Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
Historical fiction novel Cape Fever by award-winning South African author Nadia Davids has hit the shelves.
The story is set in a small, unnamed city in a colonial empire, in the year 1920. Soraya Matas believes she has found the ideal job as a personal maid to the eccentric Mrs Hattingh, whose home is not far from The Muslim Quarter where Soraya lives with her parents. However, she eventually discovers that the house is alive with spirits.
While Mrs Hattingh eagerly awaits her son’s visit from London, she offers to help Soraya stay in touch with her fiancé Nour by writing him letters on her behalf. This starts a weekly meeting where Soraya dictates and Mrs Hattingh writes, binding the two together and threatening their sanity.
“Anybody with even a passing acquaintance of Cape Town will know that it is firmly rooted in the topographies, landscapes, histories, and mythologies of the centuries-old Muslim community of Cape Town – the community that I was born and raised in,” Nadia explained.
“Soraya’s home, which I describe as The Muslim Quarter in the book, is of course based on the Bo-Kaap in Cape Town, which is the oldest continuous neighbourhood to the Muslim community.
“The reason I don’t actually name it as being Cape Town in the book is that I wanted to write something that allowed me a certain measure of freedom, to have that ability to kind of mesh and entangle history and memory, and creativity and imagination,” she added.
