Skinner's Drift

Book:	Skinner's Drift: A Novel
Author:	Lisa Fugard
Honors:	2006 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist Score: 6.56
Genres:	Fiction books
Publisher:	Scribner

Ten years after leaving South Africa, Eva van Rensburg returns to her dying father, a violent stuttering man whose terrible secret Eva has kept since she was a child, and to Skinner’s Drift, the family farm, a tough stretch of land on the Limpopo River where jackals and leopards still roam.

In this beautiful first novel, Lisa Fugard paints a haunting portrait of a family careening toward disaster. She vividly describes the isolation of Eva’s rebellious and lonely English mother; the desperation of her Afrikaner father as drought destroys his farm; the conflicts among the black farmworkers as the younger generation questions the loyalty and subservience of their elders; and the dangerous silence of a young girl who witnesses too much.

Like Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee, Fugard has written a profoundly moving family drama, subtly set against the backdrop of a country in turmoil. She moves with extraordinary agility between intimate and revelatory domestic scenes and the fiercely challenging land. This is a powerful story from a stunning new writer.

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