South African novelist Nadia Davids's twisting gothic drama Cape Fever opens by highlighting narrator Soraya's ability to read, which she keeps from her employer. Soraya goes to work as combined cleaner and cook for the settler Mrs. Hattingh in 1920. In the colonial city in which Mrs. Hattingh reigns over a large, lonely home, Soraya's close-knit, loving family lives in the nearby Muslim quarter; Soraya is rarely permitted by her employer to visit. Soraya's fiancé, Nour, is an accomplished scholar who works on a farm while saving for teachers' college.
There are moments in which Soraya feels something like fellowship with her employer, but working for and living with Mrs. Hattingh, under power structures bigger than the individual, is deeply unpleasant. Soraya retreats, in her small room, into the stories and characters that have come to her all her life: the Gray Women, as she terms the spirits that she alone can see; a seawoman with ink for blood. She finds Mrs. Hattingh's house is teeming with spirits.
Mrs. Hattingh introduces a new comfort and stressor when she offers to write to Nour on Soraya's behalf. As one woman takes the voice of the other--and intercepts the correspondence that arrives in return--their identities blur in disturbing ways. In the increasingly claustrophobic manor, the tension between the two women builds, resulting in complex layers of psychological intrigue amid themes of class, race, love, grief, and haunting. In Soraya's compelling voice, Davids blends mysticism, quiet power and resistance, and pain born of a long stretch of history in this unsettling tale of suspense. Cape Fever is beautiful, discomfiting, and moving. --Julia Kastner, blogger at pagesofjulia