Book description
Gardening at Night follows the unfolding of a young girl's life
through a childhood filled with silences, through adolescence and
young womanhood. It is about how much people are the total of their
longings, how high drama can also be low comedy. It probes how much of
the old century a girl should take with her into the new one, and
examines the merging of families in the Eighties and their emerging
into the florescence of the Nineties and beyond.
It is especially the story of a girl's escape from a ghost town. The
South African mining town of Kimberley was created over a hundred
years ago when men with buckets scraped out the insides of the earth
like a thousand black dentists. Now it is a place where the only tales
are those of leaving.
Winner of 2004 Commonwealth Best First Book Award.
Diane Awerbuck teaches high school English and History to Cape Town
schoolgirls. She knows that someday she will have to go back to
Kimberley.
Gardening at Night
won the 2004 Commonwealth Best First Book Award (Africa and the
Caribbean), and was shortlisted for the International Dublin IMPAC
Award. She is also author of a collection of short stories,
Cabin Fever
(2011), and the novel
Home Remedies
(2012).
