Cape Fever: a haunting new novel from award‑winning South African writer Nadia Davids

By Olivier Moreillon

There’s a line in Cape Fever, the new book by award-winning South African novelist and playwright Nadia Davids, that doesn’t just establish the story, it also makes a haunting promise:

But small house, big house, smells or no smells, this is much the same: that in the city you will come to know a person by two things: what’s inside their house, and the house’s way with the wind.

The remark gestures towards the invisible forces moving through both houses and history. Just as a building’s “way with the wind” reveals how it stands in relation to its surroundings, Davids suggests that a household’s inner life exposes the moral currents shaping an entire society.

What lies inside Mrs Hattingh’s decaying colonial manor thus becomes a measure not only of its inhabitants’ inner lives, but also of an entire colonial society teetering on the brink of moral and historical