CAPE FEVER

228pp., paperback, First UK Edition, Scribner, London, 2026 

ISBN: 9781398554238

First published in the USA in 2025.

Nineteen year-old Soraya Matas is sent by her mother to work as a personal maid to the elderly Mrs Hattingh, whose grand but decaying home is not far from the Muslim Quarter where Soraya lives with her parents. Despite being from different worlds, the two women end up bound to one another, trapped in the silent power struggle that eventually threatens the sanity of both.

"Efficient, and unsettling … Davids assembles the requisite parts of a Gothic novel – a hysterical woman, a haunted dwelling, a perverse family secret – into an elegant narrative" New York Times Book Review

"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" J. M. Coetze, Nobel Laureate

South African playwright, novelist and academic Nadia Davids is a former President of PEN South Africa. She is the author of the novel An Imperfect Blessing and plays At Her Feet, Cissie and What Remains, which 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.