Cape Fever

An exhilarating tale of twisted desire and the unexpected shape of revenge, for readers of The Safekeep

‘I come highly recommended to Mrs Hattingh through sentences I tell her I cannot read.’

1920, a small, unnamed city in a colonial empire. Soraya Matas believes she has found the ideal job as a personal maid to the eccentric Mrs Hattingh, whose beautiful, decaying home is not far from the Muslim quarter where Soraya lives with her parents. As Soraya settles into her new role, she 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. So begins a strange weekly meeting where Soraya dictates and Mrs. Hattingh writes – a ritual that binds the two women to one another and eventually threatens the sanity of both.

 
‘Slim, taut, haunting… an utterly beguiling read’ LUCY CALDWELL

‘The Cape Town that Nadia Davids summons up in her invaluable body of work is a riven, achingly sad place of shadows, quite unlike the comfortable, sleepy Mother City of the colonial imagination’ JM COETZEE

Author Biography

Nadia Davids is an acclaimed South African playwright, novelist, academic, and former President of PEN South Africa. Her debut novel An Imperfect Blessing was shortlisted for the Etisalat Prize for Literature. Her plays At Her Feet and What Remains have been staged internationally. She has been a visiting scholar/artist at the University of California, Berkeley, and at New York University, the recipient of a Philip Leverhulme Prize, and has taught theater at Queen Mary University of London and literature at the University of Cape Town. Her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The American Scholar, Astra Magazine, The Georgia Review, and Zyzzyva Magazine. She won the 2024 Caine Prize for her short story, “Bridling.” She lives in California and was a writer in residence at Aspen Writes.