CROOKED SEEDS

181pp., paperback, First SA Edition, Cape Town, 2024

First published in the UK in 2024.

Novel set in Cape Town in 2028. Deidre van Deventer, living in a crumbling public housing complex, receives a call from the South African police. Her family home, recently reclaimed by the government, has become the scene of a criminal investigation - the remains of several bodies have been unearthed from her land, after decades underground.

"Karen Jennings is a modern master of the castaway novel. Her characters are often exiled from the world - physically or psychologically, sometimes both. Deidre and Trudy are unforgettable characters living on the margins of life. Together they make this an unsparing, yet profoundly beautiful novel."  Chigozie Obioma, author of The Fishermen and An Orchestra of Minorities

"Deidre’s the kind of character who gets under your skin: furious, flawed and utterly unique. Jennings writes about broken people with unflinching honesty and deep compassion. A quietly devastating novel.’" Jan Carson, author of The Raptures

Karen Jennings was born in Cape Town in 1982. She is the author of the novels An Island, Finding Soutbek, Travels with My Father – an autobiographical novel and Upturned Earth; the short story collection Away from the Dead and the poetry collection Space Inhabited by Echoes. She is currently writer-in-residence as a post-doctoral fellow at the Laboratory for the Economics of Africa’s Past, Stellenbosch University.