Under Glass

In 1857 a young Englishwoman arrives in Port Natal from India to make a new life for her family among settlers, homesteaders, and sugar-cane farmers. She is with her daughter and the child’s ayah, and has been travelling for eleven months to join her husband, already deep in the hinterland. Her father-in-law has staked them their passage, a sum for settlement and an arrangement for the purchase of land, but there are conditions to his generosity that will have a lasting effect on the pair, and particularly on their fifth child, Cosmo, born years later. It is on the family’s sugar-cane farm that the reader begins to understand that there is something peculiar about young Cosmo, something that must be kept secret. At once an intriguing mystery and a meditation on the region’s colonial history, Under Glass is a high-stakes narrative of deception and disguise by one of South Africa’s finest novelists.