An elegant and evocative novel about people, place and pests by one of South Africa's most exciting writers. Katya Grubbs, like her father before her, deals in 'the unlovely and unloved'. Yet in contrast to her father, she is not in the business of pest extermination, but pest relocation. Katya's unconventional approach brings her to the attention of a property developer whose luxury estate on the fringes of Cape Town, Nineveh, remains uninhabited thanks to an infestation of mysterious insects. As Katya is drawn ever deeper into the chaotic urban wilderness of Nineveh, she must confront unwelcome intrusions from her own past. SELLING POINTS: Author has been twice shortlisted for South Africa's top literary prize, the Sunday Times Fiction Prize Deep sense of place and the natural world Simultaneous US publication AUTHOR: Henrietta Rose-Innes is from Cape Town but is currently completing a PhD at UEA. She won the Caine Prize for African Writing 2008 and the HSBC / PEN Short Story Prize 2007 and was runner-up in the BBC Short Story Award 2012. Her work is included in the Granta Book of the African Short Story (2011) and is published in several languages. REVIEWS: 'Henrietta Rose-Innes writes an admirably taut, clean prose. A welcome addition to the new South African literature.' J M Coetzee 'I love Henrietta Rose-Innes' work. With plotlines that are wittily subversive and language that is whippet-lean, it is long overdue for discovery by a wider readership.' Patrick Gale 'Rose-Innes is a writer almost in the Virginia Woolf mould lateral of mind and poetic in her style of narration.' Sunday Times (SA) 'A compellingly enigmatic story, [2008 Caine Prize winner] POISON's few pages are also an eloquent vignette of the "new" South Africa.' The Guardian