From a bold new voice in literary fiction comes a compelling story of three mothers whose lives intersect during a generation-defining period in South Africa’s history. Intrigued? Read on to discover the synopsis and excerpt from Colleen van Niekerk’s A Conspiracy of Mothers, which is out now!
The year is 1994, and South Africa is in political turmoil as its first democratic election looms. Against a backdrop of apartheid and racial violence, traumatized artist Yolanda Petersen returns from the Appalachian foothills to the land of her youth at the behest of her mother. While there Yolanda longs to reconnect with her estranged daughter, Ingrid, the product of an illegal mixed-race affair with a white man.
But Ingrid is missing, and as Yolanda quickly discovers, she isn’t the only woman in Cape Town desperate to protect her own. Ingrid’s very existence is proof of a white man’s crime, and that man’s mother will do anything—even kill—to ensure the truth remains buried.
An evocative debut novel set during a defining period in history, A Conspiracy of Mothers tells a gripping story of love and betrayal from multiple perspectives while deftly balancing the painful legacy of apartheid with the trials of motherhood.
EXCERPT
YOLANDA
Night has no color. It has smell, taste, flickering visuals. It is not a void but a time when the presence of other things pushes forward. Darkness sets upon Yolanda, heavy and tight as a vise. Weary, she knows that she will always face the night alone, no matter who is in the room, who is in her bed.
Yet fear rises in her like bile, for this night brings more with it than shadows.
Come home, the voice said, the one she heard after she closed her eyes and lay down on her bed. It was Ma’s voice again, wafting in on the wind that raised the tattered net curtain of Yolanda’s bedroom like a hand. Two words, drifting in with the scent of fresh rain and wet soil, with the sound of horses neighing in the nearby stables. Rachel, her mother, was beckoning her away from this Virginia hamlet and back to Cape Town’s unforgiving shore, as if an absence of eighteen years was nothing at all.
These two words had come over several weeks now, straining Yolanda’s worn spirit where it felt held together by rusted rivets, pushing at the tight, painful places within her. The call left her in agony. It illuminated the shards of her broken heart that she’d so carefully papered over. An insomniac accustomed to resting in the security of daylight, she was finding herself too disturbed to get much sleep at all.
Fatigued, she looked up at the ceiling of her bedroom before drifting into an unsettled half sleep. But a cluster of ghouls sat at the periphery of her mind. Exhaustion had drained her of the will to keep them at bay. They were ready to prey again.
Then it came like a switch: the sound of a belt buckle.
Her heart began to race. The shadows at the foot of her bed grew deeper, darker. The belt belonged to Garrick, her boyfriend. He had come in from the stables, into her bathroom. Garrick was a safe harbor for her, yet to Yolanda the sound didn’t come from him, not then.
“Help,” she gasped, forming white-knuckled fists with her trembling hands. But the ghouls pushed forward. They were standing over her again, belt buckles loosening, hands reaching. They jostled with each other over who was going to go next. They dragged her present self back into the past with them, forcing her, forcing her to look where she didn’t want to. Night drew her in.
Excerpted from A Conspiracy of Mothers by Colleen van Neikirk. © 2021 Published by Little A Books, October 1, 2021. All Rights Reserved.
