A brilliant and uncompromising new voice in fiction from South Africa.

Gardening at Night follows the unfolding of a young girl's life through a childhood filled with silences, through adolescence and young womanhood. It is about how much people are the total of their longings, how high drama can also be low comedy. It probes how much of the old century a girl should take with her into the new one, and examines the merging of families in the Eighties and their emerging into the florescence of the Nineties and beyond. It is especially the story of a girl's escape from a ghost town. The South African mining town of Kimberley was created over a hundred years ago when men with buckets scraped out the insides of the earth like a thousand black dentists. Now it is a place where the only tales are those of leaving. 'Gardening at Night is feisty, and funky, and funny. And even in moments of bleakness and shock Diane Awerbuck's brand of wry humour turns this unusual and amazing first novel into a remarkable reading adventure. This is a South Africa the international reader has not yet seen: the wood of smallness and ordinariness and quirkiness of everyday life hidden behind the trees of politics. Andr- Brink