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Crooked Seeds
A woman in post-apartheid South Africa confronts her family's troubling past in this taut and daring novel about national trauma and collective guilt—from the Booker Prize longlisted author of An Island
In her parched, crumbling corner of a Cape Town public housing complex, Deidre van Deventer receives a call from the South African police department. Her family home, recently reclaimed by the government, has become the scene of a criminal investigation. The remains of several bodies have just been unearthed from their land, after decades underground. Detectives pepper her with Was your brother a member of a pro-apartheid group in the 1990s? Is it true that he was building bombs as part of a terrorist plot?
Deirdre doesn’t know the answers to most of these questions. All she knows is that she was denied—repeatedly—the life she felt she overshadowed by her brother, then abandoned by her daughter, Deidre has been left to watch over her aging mother, making do with government help and the fading generosity of her neighbors. But as alarming evidence from the investigation continues to surface, and detectives pressure her to share what she knows of her family’s disturbing past, Deidre must finally confront her own shattered memories so that something better might emerge from what remains.
In exquisitely spare prose, Crooked Seeds is a singularly powerful novel about collective guilt, national traumas, and the ways we become trapped in prisons of our own making.
In her parched, crumbling corner of a Cape Town public housing complex, Deidre van Deventer receives a call from the South African police department. Her family home, recently reclaimed by the government, has become the scene of a criminal investigation. The remains of several bodies have just been unearthed from their land, after decades underground. Detectives pepper her with Was your brother a member of a pro-apartheid group in the 1990s? Is it true that he was building bombs as part of a terrorist plot?
Deirdre doesn’t know the answers to most of these questions. All she knows is that she was denied—repeatedly—the life she felt she overshadowed by her brother, then abandoned by her daughter, Deidre has been left to watch over her aging mother, making do with government help and the fading generosity of her neighbors. But as alarming evidence from the investigation continues to surface, and detectives pressure her to share what she knows of her family’s disturbing past, Deidre must finally confront her own shattered memories so that something better might emerge from what remains.
In exquisitely spare prose, Crooked Seeds is a singularly powerful novel about collective guilt, national traumas, and the ways we become trapped in prisons of our own making.
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First published April 16, 2024
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About the author
Karen Jennings
39 books145 followersKaren Jennings is a South African writer based in Cape Town. She works in the History Department at the University of Stellenbosch, and particularly on the “Biography of an Uncharted People” project. Her debut American novel, An Island, was longlisted for the Booker Prize.
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April 9, 2024
You can still smell the smoke.
Eleven years ago this month, Claire Messud published a brilliant, incendiary novel called “The Woman Upstairs.” The narrator, Nora, is that most alarming and repellent character: a bitter woman. Single, childless and middle-aged, she won’t smile to look pretty. She won’t effuse to make us feel better. Her fury is boundless. When she says, “I’ll set the world on fire,” she doesn’t mean with a song in her heart.
When the book came out, an interviewer for Publishers Weekly asked Messud, “I wouldn’t want to be friends with Nora, would you?”
With withering, Nora-like irritation, Messud shot back: “For heaven’s sake, what kind of question is that? Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert? Would you want to be friends with Mickey Sabbath? Saleem Sinai? Hamlet? Krapp? Oedipus? Oscar Wao? Antigone? Raskolnikov? Any of the characters in ‘The Corrections’? Any of the characters in ‘Infinite Jest’? Any of the characters in anything Pynchon has ever written? Or Martin Amis? Or Orhan Pamuk? Or Alice Munro, for that matter? If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble.”
Predictably, the book world exploded with arguments about how likable a protagonist must be. It was an epic debate: “Madame Bovary c’est moi!” vs. “Madame Bovary ce n’est pas moi!” Readers of popular fiction were scolded for their narrow tastes, their childish refusal to fraternize with unappealing characters.
This month, as I read Karen Jennings’s new novel, “Crooked Seeds,” that old literary quarrel repeated on me like tainted meat. I’m not necessarily looking for friends in fiction, but it’s been years since I read a book that strained the Likability Principle so viscerally. Jennings’s previous novel, “An Island,” was longlisted for the Booker Prize, but I fear the more I tell you about “Crooked Seeds,” the less likely you’ll be to pick it up — unless you’re wearing gloves and a mask.
The story’s opening episode quickly....
To read the rest of this review, go to The Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/...
Eleven years ago this month, Claire Messud published a brilliant, incendiary novel called “The Woman Upstairs.” The narrator, Nora, is that most alarming and repellent character: a bitter woman. Single, childless and middle-aged, she won’t smile to look pretty. She won’t effuse to make us feel better. Her fury is boundless. When she says, “I’ll set the world on fire,” she doesn’t mean with a song in her heart.
When the book came out, an interviewer for Publishers Weekly asked Messud, “I wouldn’t want to be friends with Nora, would you?”
With withering, Nora-like irritation, Messud shot back: “For heaven’s sake, what kind of question is that? Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert? Would you want to be friends with Mickey Sabbath? Saleem Sinai? Hamlet? Krapp? Oedipus? Oscar Wao? Antigone? Raskolnikov? Any of the characters in ‘The Corrections’? Any of the characters in ‘Infinite Jest’? Any of the characters in anything Pynchon has ever written? Or Martin Amis? Or Orhan Pamuk? Or Alice Munro, for that matter? If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble.”
Predictably, the book world exploded with arguments about how likable a protagonist must be. It was an epic debate: “Madame Bovary c’est moi!” vs. “Madame Bovary ce n’est pas moi!” Readers of popular fiction were scolded for their narrow tastes, their childish refusal to fraternize with unappealing characters.
This month, as I read Karen Jennings’s new novel, “Crooked Seeds,” that old literary quarrel repeated on me like tainted meat. I’m not necessarily looking for friends in fiction, but it’s been years since I read a book that strained the Likability Principle so viscerally. Jennings’s previous novel, “An Island,” was longlisted for the Booker Prize, but I fear the more I tell you about “Crooked Seeds,” the less likely you’ll be to pick it up — unless you’re wearing gloves and a mask.
The story’s opening episode quickly....
To read the rest of this review, go to The Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/...
March 13, 2025
Set in post-apartheid South Africa, this book has big themes, but at its heart, it is a story about depression and the impossibility of healing without recognizing the problem. It is the best book yet from the Women's Prize longlist, and it is also the shortest—so a must-try.
April 16, 2024
Deidre van Deventer spends her days drinking at the local bar, bumming cigarettes from her building's security guard, and queuing for her daily allotment of water in a South Africa ravaged by drought. Her family home has been reclaimed by the government and she, along with her neighbors, has been relocated to an empty old folks' home across the street from where her mother live, suffering from a long-ago depressive episode and possible dementia. Years ago her brother, Ross, fled after an incident with apparent ties to a pro-apartheid hate group that left Deirdre an amputee, and even Deidre's own daughter, Monica, lives abroad leaving Deidre with little to do each day but shuffle around in the remains of her life.
It's a sad, sorry state to start the book, but from page one, you can't look away.
Then one day the police ring Deidre and tell her that they've discovered some evidence from long ago while razing her old neighborhood to the ground and can they speak to her about what she might know? Reluctant, but with nothing else to do and looking to maybe con a meal or drink out of the officers, Deidre obliges and thus begins the series of events that unlock past histories and mysteries that cause her to wonder, what was it all for?
Karen Jennings writes in vivid, but spare prose. She crafts sentences that leave you feeling as gross as the characters are. This is not a book for people who only want to read about likable characters. Nothing about Deidre is that sympathetic; her lack of motivation, self-pitying attitude, and hygiene (or lack thereof) make her an off-putting, yet compelling person to read about. Yet Jennings doesn't seem to be writing her as a scapegoat or villain, but just an example of one life, one white South African experience, to explore larger themes that still resonate today.
Perhaps, at times the themes are a bit on the nose. But Jennings avoids cliches with her visceral images and brevity. Much stronger, I think, than her Booker longlisted novel An Island, which I did enjoy, Crooked Seeds continues Jennings interest in reckoning with the past, of a family and country, and how we might move forward without turning a blind eye.
It's a sad, sorry state to start the book, but from page one, you can't look away.
Then one day the police ring Deidre and tell her that they've discovered some evidence from long ago while razing her old neighborhood to the ground and can they speak to her about what she might know? Reluctant, but with nothing else to do and looking to maybe con a meal or drink out of the officers, Deidre obliges and thus begins the series of events that unlock past histories and mysteries that cause her to wonder, what was it all for?
Karen Jennings writes in vivid, but spare prose. She crafts sentences that leave you feeling as gross as the characters are. This is not a book for people who only want to read about likable characters. Nothing about Deidre is that sympathetic; her lack of motivation, self-pitying attitude, and hygiene (or lack thereof) make her an off-putting, yet compelling person to read about. Yet Jennings doesn't seem to be writing her as a scapegoat or villain, but just an example of one life, one white South African experience, to explore larger themes that still resonate today.
Perhaps, at times the themes are a bit on the nose. But Jennings avoids cliches with her visceral images and brevity. Much stronger, I think, than her Booker longlisted novel An Island, which I did enjoy, Crooked Seeds continues Jennings interest in reckoning with the past, of a family and country, and how we might move forward without turning a blind eye.
March 4, 2025
Longlisted for the Women's Prize 2025
A bleak tale set in future South Africa struggling with drought. Deidre van Deventer is white, has one leg, hustles and complains constantly and unwillingly discovers dark family secrets
This is difficult for you, off course, but you must agree that the truth has to come out, to leave the thing alone would have to been to deny it and cover it up and we must consider the people involved.
Deidre van Deventer is the axis around which this taut novel revolves. We find her queuing for water in future, bone dry South Africa. Living in a disheveled apartment building, waking up by drinking gherkin juice, passing dark urine and staying in bed that hasn’t a duvet not washed for over a year.
She lost a leg and has crutches.
As a self proclaimed 53 year old cripple, who didn’t finish high school, she embraces victimhood. She is displaced due to land reclamation for the building of a desalination plant, seemingly indefinitely delayed due to drought and corruption. She is thoroughly unlikeable, as remarked by one of her friends, who turns out exasperated by her constant demands, leading to this outburst:
"You know what, Deidre, you're really something else.
Every time I think I've seen the worst of you, you come out with something even more terrible. Every single time, no matter what. Are you trying to be unpleasant, tell me? Is that your plan, to be unpleasant and make everyone dislike you?
I really want to know.
Only glimmers of hope is a pregnant daughter (adopted and black) living in London for 13 years, while a missing brother casts a dark cloud, mirrored in the effects of forest fires in the area. This makes a grim read about the reverberations of the past in the present and how guilt and victimhood are at times grey and complex.
More thoughts to follow!
A bleak tale set in future South Africa struggling with drought. Deidre van Deventer is white, has one leg, hustles and complains constantly and unwillingly discovers dark family secrets
This is difficult for you, off course, but you must agree that the truth has to come out, to leave the thing alone would have to been to deny it and cover it up and we must consider the people involved.
Deidre van Deventer is the axis around which this taut novel revolves. We find her queuing for water in future, bone dry South Africa. Living in a disheveled apartment building, waking up by drinking gherkin juice, passing dark urine and staying in bed that hasn’t a duvet not washed for over a year.
She lost a leg and has crutches.
As a self proclaimed 53 year old cripple, who didn’t finish high school, she embraces victimhood. She is displaced due to land reclamation for the building of a desalination plant, seemingly indefinitely delayed due to drought and corruption. She is thoroughly unlikeable, as remarked by one of her friends, who turns out exasperated by her constant demands, leading to this outburst:
"You know what, Deidre, you're really something else.
Every time I think I've seen the worst of you, you come out with something even more terrible. Every single time, no matter what. Are you trying to be unpleasant, tell me? Is that your plan, to be unpleasant and make everyone dislike you?
I really want to know.
Only glimmers of hope is a pregnant daughter (adopted and black) living in London for 13 years, while a missing brother casts a dark cloud, mirrored in the effects of forest fires in the area. This makes a grim read about the reverberations of the past in the present and how guilt and victimhood are at times grey and complex.
More thoughts to follow!
January 20, 2024
For this is action, this not being sure, this careless
Preparing, sowing the seeds crooked in the furrow,
Making ready to forget, and always coming back
To the mooring of starting out, that day so long ago.
— From “Soonest Mended” by John Ashbery
Set in a near-future drought-stricken South Africa, Crooked Seeds begins like a dark dystopia, following a one-legged woman as she joins the early morning queue at a water truck. This Deidre is bitter and abusive — a self-proclaimed “thing of need and desperation” — and as she makes aggressively self-pitying demands on the people around her, it begins to dawn on the reader that, yes, there’s a water shortage and wildfires and government incompetence putting pressure on these citizens, but for the most part, the dystopia that Deidre lives in is of her own making. I was very impressed by the allegorical nature of Karen Jennings’ Booker Prize nominated An Island and Crooked Seeds continues in this tradition, with Deidre standing in for a certain kind of post-colonial white South African; resentful of what she has lost and willfully oblivious to the guilt of her forefathers. This is quite a short novel but it packs a powerful punch; light spoilers ahead. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Deidre’s life is suffused with her own stink and filth: living alone in public housing — her father is dead, her mother in a nursing home, her adult daughter is in England (Deidre refusing invitations to join her there), and her “genius” older brother hasn’t been seen since the incident that cost Deidre her leg at eighteen years old — she hobbles along on her crutches, bumming cigarettes from the security guard, bullying the young mother down the hallway to help her with chores, begging the bartender at the local club to extend her just a bit more credit to quench her “thirst”. When police detectives start to ask Deidre questions about the house she grew up in — a property that had been expropriated by the government because of its location over an untapped aquifer — she will be forced to reckon with what kind of man her brother, affiliated with a pro-apartheid group in the 90’s, really was.
There are subtle hints of racism in this narrative: The self-pitying Deidre is on disability — living in public housing, blowing her government cheques on cigarettes and boxed wine — but everyone she takes advantage of (the security guard, the neighbour, the bartender, her daughter) is revealed to be a hard-working Black person. Even the detectives are Black (when one of them is referred to as Constable Xaba, pronounced with “a small click in the side of the mouth”, Deidre scoffs that it would be easier for her to pronounce it Zaba, “With a name like that, she must be used to it by now”) and, post-apartheid, her demoted social standing is the real dystopia:
The novel’s title is inspired by the poem “Soonest Mended”, excerpted in its epigraph (and above), and this analysis of the poem (noting that it “explores alienation, learning the lessons of life and personal history”) was influential in my understanding of the novel. Seemingly the story of one person (highly unlikeable because she refuses to take responsibility for herself) being forced to make a reckoning with her family’s past, the themes of Crooked Seeds can be extrapolated to any colonised country: the first step in moving forward is acknowledging and taking responsibility for the traumas of the past. Really well done; especially impressive in such a short work.
Preparing, sowing the seeds crooked in the furrow,
Making ready to forget, and always coming back
To the mooring of starting out, that day so long ago.
— From “Soonest Mended” by John Ashbery
Almost at once she began tapping her fingers on the crutch handles, her throat dry and wanting. She glanced across at the queue, hoping to catch an eye, to ask if someone had a cigarette, but no one looked at her. Nothing else to see in the dawn other than rooftops starting to appear slowly, a series of them, going back and back into the gray light, each straddling something dark and stillborn — the empty rooms of empty homes. So many people had left. Yet even in the ones that were inhabited, there was only darkness. Everyone was here now, in this queue. There was no other life.
Set in a near-future drought-stricken South Africa, Crooked Seeds begins like a dark dystopia, following a one-legged woman as she joins the early morning queue at a water truck. This Deidre is bitter and abusive — a self-proclaimed “thing of need and desperation” — and as she makes aggressively self-pitying demands on the people around her, it begins to dawn on the reader that, yes, there’s a water shortage and wildfires and government incompetence putting pressure on these citizens, but for the most part, the dystopia that Deidre lives in is of her own making. I was very impressed by the allegorical nature of Karen Jennings’ Booker Prize nominated An Island and Crooked Seeds continues in this tradition, with Deidre standing in for a certain kind of post-colonial white South African; resentful of what she has lost and willfully oblivious to the guilt of her forefathers. This is quite a short novel but it packs a powerful punch; light spoilers ahead. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
She woke with the thirst already upon her, still in her clothes, cold from having slept on top of the covers. Two days, three, since she had last changed; the smell of her overcast with sweat, fried food, cigarettes. Underwear’s stink strong enough that it reached her even before she moved to squat over an old plastic mixing bowl that lived beside the bed. She steadied her weight on the bed frame with one hand, the other holding on to the seat of a wooden chair that creaked as she lowered herself. She didn’t have to put the light on, knew by the burn and smell that the urine was dark, dark as cough syrup, as sickness.
Deidre’s life is suffused with her own stink and filth: living alone in public housing — her father is dead, her mother in a nursing home, her adult daughter is in England (Deidre refusing invitations to join her there), and her “genius” older brother hasn’t been seen since the incident that cost Deidre her leg at eighteen years old — she hobbles along on her crutches, bumming cigarettes from the security guard, bullying the young mother down the hallway to help her with chores, begging the bartender at the local club to extend her just a bit more credit to quench her “thirst”. When police detectives start to ask Deidre questions about the house she grew up in — a property that had been expropriated by the government because of its location over an untapped aquifer — she will be forced to reckon with what kind of man her brother, affiliated with a pro-apartheid group in the 90’s, really was.
There are subtle hints of racism in this narrative: The self-pitying Deidre is on disability — living in public housing, blowing her government cheques on cigarettes and boxed wine — but everyone she takes advantage of (the security guard, the neighbour, the bartender, her daughter) is revealed to be a hard-working Black person. Even the detectives are Black (when one of them is referred to as Constable Xaba, pronounced with “a small click in the side of the mouth”, Deidre scoffs that it would be easier for her to pronounce it Zaba, “With a name like that, she must be used to it by now”) and, post-apartheid, her demoted social standing is the real dystopia:
There had been stories about that in the tabloids. About white people losing their jobs, not being able to find any others, of losing everything and having to live on the streets, where they were starving to death. There were photos of white children begging, of white women working as domestics for black families. A world on its head. A world that had been feared by some and that was easy to point at now, these few cases, and to say, “You see, you see.”
The novel’s title is inspired by the poem “Soonest Mended”, excerpted in its epigraph (and above), and this analysis of the poem (noting that it “explores alienation, learning the lessons of life and personal history”) was influential in my understanding of the novel. Seemingly the story of one person (highly unlikeable because she refuses to take responsibility for herself) being forced to make a reckoning with her family’s past, the themes of Crooked Seeds can be extrapolated to any colonised country: the first step in moving forward is acknowledging and taking responsibility for the traumas of the past. Really well done; especially impressive in such a short work.
December 5, 2024
I have not read Karen Jennings previous novel - the Booker longlisted An Island so I really had no idea what to expect when I was lent her latest book Crooked Seeds.
Set in South Africa in 2028 ( this is not exactly made explict which is a little confounding ) during a period of extreme water shortage. Its the story of Deidre van Deventer, a hard to love individual who has a complicated family background, the details of which are skillfully drip-feed to the reader over the course of the novel.
Its a fairly cheerless and grimy endeavour overall and maybe not a book that will leave a lasting imprint on me. I do seem to struggle with South African literature generally, and looking back at my reviews of The Promise by Damon Galgut and July's People by Nadine Gordimer I always write some variation on - this book is where joy comes to die.
However the author has produced a very unique "unlikeable" character.
Set in South Africa in 2028 ( this is not exactly made explict which is a little confounding ) during a period of extreme water shortage. Its the story of Deidre van Deventer, a hard to love individual who has a complicated family background, the details of which are skillfully drip-feed to the reader over the course of the novel.
Its a fairly cheerless and grimy endeavour overall and maybe not a book that will leave a lasting imprint on me. I do seem to struggle with South African literature generally, and looking back at my reviews of The Promise by Damon Galgut and July's People by Nadine Gordimer I always write some variation on - this book is where joy comes to die.
However the author has produced a very unique "unlikeable" character.
June 22, 2024
Intense and gripping story, from the first page to the last.
How does Karen Jennings write so little, yet pack so much weight into so few words? She pulls you in, only to steamroll over you with her writing. She’s a skilled writer; her prose is concise and succinct.
She sets the mood through her detailed descriptions, creating a vivid yet brutal atmosphere. Although the story is brutal, you cannot look away. You must continue reading to find out what happened, so long ago, only to discover the most devastating truth. The unimaginable.
As thirsty for a glass of water, the narrator, Deidre Van Deventer is from page one, she begins to tell her tragic story, as her need for water increases. Water. We will die without access to clean, fresh water. Every human being needs water to survive. Unfortunately, “crooked seeds” hinder growth, particularly without water. Please read this novel now.
How does Karen Jennings write so little, yet pack so much weight into so few words? She pulls you in, only to steamroll over you with her writing. She’s a skilled writer; her prose is concise and succinct.
She sets the mood through her detailed descriptions, creating a vivid yet brutal atmosphere. Although the story is brutal, you cannot look away. You must continue reading to find out what happened, so long ago, only to discover the most devastating truth. The unimaginable.
As thirsty for a glass of water, the narrator, Deidre Van Deventer is from page one, she begins to tell her tragic story, as her need for water increases. Water. We will die without access to clean, fresh water. Every human being needs water to survive. Unfortunately, “crooked seeds” hinder growth, particularly without water. Please read this novel now.
April 20, 2024
This is a dark and depressing novel about a highly unlikeable main character, amputee Deidre, who is coming to terms with her current life in an almost dystopic Cape Town (water shortages, power issues) and also the legacy of her family’s actions during the apartheid era. I found it hard to look away as the story unfolds and still have questions at the end. An intense read.
March 4, 2025
Longlisted for the 2025 Women's Prize for Fiction
Longlisted for the 2025 Republic of Consciousness Prize, UK & Ireland, for small presses
Deidre sat up, blinked, aware now of the brightness of the room. It caught at her throat, clasped her there, a sudden desperation at this light, this bright and horrifying light. The room had shrunk, the depths and shadows had gone, everything small now, smaller than it ought to be. A place of tired excess. All these things she had kept, had demanded to keep, because of what they meant to her; furniture her father had made, decorations from the old house, and all of them, these things she had said she could not live without, stained where she grabbed at them to grip her way around the room, and now this brightness, so that the stains glared, showing her what she already knew herself to be: a thing of need and desperation.
Crooked Seeds is by Karen Jennings, who previous novel, An Island was longlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize. As with that work, it is published by the small independent press Holland House Books, founded in 2012. And following her Booker longlisting Jennings founded The Island Prize, run by Holland House, curated with the primary aim of helping African writers break into the UK publishing scene. I first encountered the press via Kate Armstrong's brilliant The Storyteller which was longlisted for the inaugural Republic of Consciousness Prize.
Jennings has stated that Crooked Seeds is the third in a series of novels, an “earth collection” with Upturned Earth and An Island, exploring “the connections to the land and what is buried and hidden. You can see how people are considering whose land it is.” And whereas The Island is set in an abstact setting, this, like Upturned Earth, is set in South Africa, specifically Cape Town, but a bleak but plausible near-future version in around 2029 (from references to the narrator's age in 1994 and now), where load-shedding is a daily occurrence, The Post Office is bankrupt, Table Mountain is ravaged by frequent wild fires, and there are extreme water shortgages.
Nothing else to see in the dawn other than rooftops starting to appear slowly, a series of them, going back and back into the grey light, each straddling something dark and stillborn—the empty rooms of empty homes. So many people had left. Yet even in the ones that were inhabited, there was only darkness. Everyone was here now, in this queue. There was no other life.
Crooked Seeds takes it's title from from the poem “Soonest Mended” by John Ashbery, particularly the closing lines, which form the novel's epigraph, but the opening line “Barely tolerated, living on the margin” is very much how Deidre, from whose perpsective most of the novel is written, would see herself.
The novel sets out its stall, and Deidre's character, in the opening paragraph:
She woke with the thirst already upon her, still in her clothes, cold from having slept on top of the covers. Two days, three, since she had last changed; the smell of her overcast with sweat, fried food, cigarettes. Underwear’s stink strong enough that it reached her even before she moved to squat over an old plastic mixing bowl that lived beside the bed. She steadied her weight on the bed frame with one hand, the other holding on to the seat of a wooden chair that creaked as she lowered herself. She didn’t have to put the light on, knew by the burn and smell that the urine was dark, dark as cough syrup, as sickness.
Aged 53, Deidre lives on her own in somewhat self-inflicted squalor. She lost one of her legs in an accident (whose details emerge as the novel progresses) in 1994, in the run-up to the first truly democratic elections. She has never warn a prosthetic, claiming it felt strange whne she tried one, but, cynically, it's hard for the reader not to think she enjoys the benefits of her disability being visible: "Come on, help me out. Look at me, I’m a fucking cripple.” a typical refrain as she jumps queues, demands favours from acquaintances and strangers alike, and bums cigarettes and drinks.
Deidre lives alone. Her father has passed away; Deidre's mother Trudy, who suffered from mental illness after Deidre's accident and the disappearance of Deidre's brother Ross, is in a nearby nursing home although Deidre relies on her neighbour Miriam to visit and care for Trudy; and Deidre's adopted daughter Monica now lives in the UK.
Other chapters put us in the confused mind of Trudy, who imagines Ross is visiting her, a son from both her own memories and Deidre's who very much came first in her affections, and who she regarded as rather more successful ("A genius. That’s what he was, a real genius ... A mind like his is special. It gets bored easily. It isn’t motivated by this nonsense they teach at school.") than all evidence would suggest is warranted. Trudy's own brother Rossouw, after whom Ross was named, seems to be equally delusionally fated in the family and Deidre delights in pointing out:
“Ja. The thing is, he was like the family god, the perfect specimen and everything. I don’t know, that side of the family has always been crazy about their sons. So, after high school he’s doing his compulsory service and he’s all set to go off and fight in the Border War, and the family’s already calling him a hero and he’s saving the country, just him on his own. I mean, that’s the shit my mom always told us, me and Ross, because he was named after him, right, this hero who gave his life for the country and was killed by some scum up there.”
“Jesus.”
Deidre came out of the bathroom. “Ja, but the thing is that none of it was even true. My dad told me that Rossouw never even made it to the war. He’d fucked some woman somewhere and got gonorrhea from her, and he was scared shitless about it and what his mom would say, so he drank a bottle of pills and choked to death on his own vomit.”
And Ross's own story proves to be rather worse , and when the former family home, appropriated by the Government, is being refurbished, some horrific discoveries suggest Ross's past may be even worse than Deidre suspected.
However, the novel's plot feels less central to its success than the memorable awful character of Deidre, this her neighbour Miriam tries to discuss the forthcoming elections, only for Deidre to reveal she has never voted (and at the same reach for the implicit claim of reverse racism that underlies her self-pity):
“Listen, it’s different for you. You’re Coloured so voting actually means something to you and your people because you were kept from it for all those years. So for you voting is like really meaningful, it has an actual reason.”
“I can’t believe what you’re saying. Can you even hear yourself? Voting isn’t just for Coloureds or Blacks. It has a reason for everyone.”
She shrugged, pushing out her lower lip. “I just never saw the point for me. The government doesn’t care about me, so why waste my time on it?”
“Seriously?” The car swerved a little, but Miriam righted it at once, kept her eyes on the road. “You fucking live off a fucking disability grant. You don’t think that involves the government caring about you?”
“Just relax, you’re getting too upset. I don’t vote, I never have, that’s all there is to it. Isn’t that my choice?”
Miriam shook her head, chewed the insides of her cheeks. “You know what, Deidre, you’re really something else. Every time I think I’ve seen the worst of you, you come out with something even more terrible."
And yet Jennings success is to show us, admist what seems to be unadulerated terribleness and blackly comic self-absorption, the little girl, the daughter as well as the mother, inside of Deidre:
She hung up the phone, returned it to her bag, then looked up at the burning mountain, the scarred face of it, slopes of black and ruin, the great smoldering expanse parched and heaving. If only the rain would come, just a little bit of rain, to wet the soil, feed the seeds, so that something might grow again.
The judges' citation
“Set in contemporary South Africa, this novel features an extra-ordinary main character who is entirely engaging despite never becoming likeable. The writing is gritty and uncompromising. This is both a portrait of a woman who cannot escape from the past and an investigation of a country in crisis.”
The publisher
Holland House began in 2012 and our first novel ‘The Absent Woman’ by Marlene Lee was published the following year. Since then we have published over 40 books.
We focus on literary fiction and non-fiction, ranging from Nathalie Abi-Ezzi’s Paper Sparrows, set in Lebanon, to Emma Darwin’s This is Not a Book About Charles Darwin, taking in Lili, the story of a Holocaust survivor, The Storyteller, an extraordinary novel about mental illness, Pax, a dual-narrative novel based on Rubens’ diplomatic visit to London, and An Island, an intense study of home and refugees. We also dabble in poetry, such as the wonderful illustrated poem ‘Greta and the Labrador’ and the beautiful bi-lingual Café By Wren’s St James-In-The-Fields, Lunchtime, by Anna Blasiak, with photographs by her partner, Lisa Kalloo.
Longlisted for the 2025 Republic of Consciousness Prize, UK & Ireland, for small presses
Deidre sat up, blinked, aware now of the brightness of the room. It caught at her throat, clasped her there, a sudden desperation at this light, this bright and horrifying light. The room had shrunk, the depths and shadows had gone, everything small now, smaller than it ought to be. A place of tired excess. All these things she had kept, had demanded to keep, because of what they meant to her; furniture her father had made, decorations from the old house, and all of them, these things she had said she could not live without, stained where she grabbed at them to grip her way around the room, and now this brightness, so that the stains glared, showing her what she already knew herself to be: a thing of need and desperation.
Crooked Seeds is by Karen Jennings, who previous novel, An Island was longlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize. As with that work, it is published by the small independent press Holland House Books, founded in 2012. And following her Booker longlisting Jennings founded The Island Prize, run by Holland House, curated with the primary aim of helping African writers break into the UK publishing scene. I first encountered the press via Kate Armstrong's brilliant The Storyteller which was longlisted for the inaugural Republic of Consciousness Prize.
We focus on literary fiction and non-fiction, ranging from Nathalie Abi-Ezzi’s Paper Sparrows, set in Lebanon, to Emma Darwin’s This is Not a Book About Charles Darwin, taking in Lili, the story of a Holocaust survivor, The Storyteller, an extraordinary novel about mental illness, Pax, a dual-narrative novel based on Rubens’ diplomatic visit to London, and An Island, an intense study of home and refugees. We also dabble in poetry, such as the wonderful illustrated poem ‘Greta and the Labrador’ and the beautiful bi-lingual Café By Wren’s St James-In-The-Fields, Lunchtime, by Anna Blasiak, with photographs by her partner, Lisa Kalloo.
Jennings has stated that Crooked Seeds is the third in a series of novels, an “earth collection” with Upturned Earth and An Island, exploring “the connections to the land and what is buried and hidden. You can see how people are considering whose land it is.” And whereas The Island is set in an abstact setting, this, like Upturned Earth, is set in South Africa, specifically Cape Town, but a bleak but plausible near-future version in around 2029 (from references to the narrator's age in 1994 and now), where load-shedding is a daily occurrence, The Post Office is bankrupt, Table Mountain is ravaged by frequent wild fires, and there are extreme water shortgages.
Nothing else to see in the dawn other than rooftops starting to appear slowly, a series of them, going back and back into the grey light, each straddling something dark and stillborn—the empty rooms of empty homes. So many people had left. Yet even in the ones that were inhabited, there was only darkness. Everyone was here now, in this queue. There was no other life.
Crooked Seeds takes it's title from from the poem “Soonest Mended” by John Ashbery, particularly the closing lines, which form the novel's epigraph, but the opening line “Barely tolerated, living on the margin” is very much how Deidre, from whose perpsective most of the novel is written, would see herself.
The novel sets out its stall, and Deidre's character, in the opening paragraph:
She woke with the thirst already upon her, still in her clothes, cold from having slept on top of the covers. Two days, three, since she had last changed; the smell of her overcast with sweat, fried food, cigarettes. Underwear’s stink strong enough that it reached her even before she moved to squat over an old plastic mixing bowl that lived beside the bed. She steadied her weight on the bed frame with one hand, the other holding on to the seat of a wooden chair that creaked as she lowered herself. She didn’t have to put the light on, knew by the burn and smell that the urine was dark, dark as cough syrup, as sickness.
Aged 53, Deidre lives on her own in somewhat self-inflicted squalor. She lost one of her legs in an accident (whose details emerge as the novel progresses) in 1994, in the run-up to the first truly democratic elections. She has never warn a prosthetic, claiming it felt strange whne she tried one, but, cynically, it's hard for the reader not to think she enjoys the benefits of her disability being visible: "Come on, help me out. Look at me, I’m a fucking cripple.” a typical refrain as she jumps queues, demands favours from acquaintances and strangers alike, and bums cigarettes and drinks.
Deidre lives alone. Her father has passed away; Deidre's mother Trudy, who suffered from mental illness after Deidre's accident and the disappearance of Deidre's brother Ross, is in a nearby nursing home although Deidre relies on her neighbour Miriam to visit and care for Trudy; and Deidre's adopted daughter Monica now lives in the UK.
Other chapters put us in the confused mind of Trudy, who imagines Ross is visiting her, a son from both her own memories and Deidre's who very much came first in her affections, and who she regarded as rather more successful ("A genius. That’s what he was, a real genius ... A mind like his is special. It gets bored easily. It isn’t motivated by this nonsense they teach at school.") than all evidence would suggest is warranted. Trudy's own brother Rossouw, after whom Ross was named, seems to be equally delusionally fated in the family and Deidre delights in pointing out:
“Ja. The thing is, he was like the family god, the perfect specimen and everything. I don’t know, that side of the family has always been crazy about their sons. So, after high school he’s doing his compulsory service and he’s all set to go off and fight in the Border War, and the family’s already calling him a hero and he’s saving the country, just him on his own. I mean, that’s the shit my mom always told us, me and Ross, because he was named after him, right, this hero who gave his life for the country and was killed by some scum up there.”
“Jesus.”
Deidre came out of the bathroom. “Ja, but the thing is that none of it was even true. My dad told me that Rossouw never even made it to the war. He’d fucked some woman somewhere and got gonorrhea from her, and he was scared shitless about it and what his mom would say, so he drank a bottle of pills and choked to death on his own vomit.”
And Ross's own story proves to be rather worse , and when the former family home, appropriated by the Government, is being refurbished, some horrific discoveries suggest Ross's past may be even worse than Deidre suspected.
However, the novel's plot feels less central to its success than the memorable awful character of Deidre, this her neighbour Miriam tries to discuss the forthcoming elections, only for Deidre to reveal she has never voted (and at the same reach for the implicit claim of reverse racism that underlies her self-pity):
“Listen, it’s different for you. You’re Coloured so voting actually means something to you and your people because you were kept from it for all those years. So for you voting is like really meaningful, it has an actual reason.”
“I can’t believe what you’re saying. Can you even hear yourself? Voting isn’t just for Coloureds or Blacks. It has a reason for everyone.”
She shrugged, pushing out her lower lip. “I just never saw the point for me. The government doesn’t care about me, so why waste my time on it?”
“Seriously?” The car swerved a little, but Miriam righted it at once, kept her eyes on the road. “You fucking live off a fucking disability grant. You don’t think that involves the government caring about you?”
“Just relax, you’re getting too upset. I don’t vote, I never have, that’s all there is to it. Isn’t that my choice?”
Miriam shook her head, chewed the insides of her cheeks. “You know what, Deidre, you’re really something else. Every time I think I’ve seen the worst of you, you come out with something even more terrible."
And yet Jennings success is to show us, admist what seems to be unadulerated terribleness and blackly comic self-absorption, the little girl, the daughter as well as the mother, inside of Deidre:
She hung up the phone, returned it to her bag, then looked up at the burning mountain, the scarred face of it, slopes of black and ruin, the great smoldering expanse parched and heaving. If only the rain would come, just a little bit of rain, to wet the soil, feed the seeds, so that something might grow again.
The judges' citation
“Set in contemporary South Africa, this novel features an extra-ordinary main character who is entirely engaging despite never becoming likeable. The writing is gritty and uncompromising. This is both a portrait of a woman who cannot escape from the past and an investigation of a country in crisis.”
The publisher
Holland House began in 2012 and our first novel ‘The Absent Woman’ by Marlene Lee was published the following year. Since then we have published over 40 books.
We focus on literary fiction and non-fiction, ranging from Nathalie Abi-Ezzi’s Paper Sparrows, set in Lebanon, to Emma Darwin’s This is Not a Book About Charles Darwin, taking in Lili, the story of a Holocaust survivor, The Storyteller, an extraordinary novel about mental illness, Pax, a dual-narrative novel based on Rubens’ diplomatic visit to London, and An Island, an intense study of home and refugees. We also dabble in poetry, such as the wonderful illustrated poem ‘Greta and the Labrador’ and the beautiful bi-lingual Café By Wren’s St James-In-The-Fields, Lunchtime, by Anna Blasiak, with photographs by her partner, Lisa Kalloo.
March 12, 2025
This was bleak bleak bleak. If that’s not your thing, look away, but if you can bear it, this was a well crafted story of trauma set in a near future South Africa. I feel that the author must have experienced significant challenges in her life to be able to draw traumatised characters the way she does. I found this short tale very powerful.
January 8, 2024
Set in post-apartheid Cape Town, South Africa, Crooked Seeds traces the life of Deidre, a woman suffering from generational trauma having been made an amputee thanks to her brother's bomb making activities. Said brother was the gem of their mother's eye, always given the treats, always favored above Deidre. She now finds herself living in unspeakable conditions, not lifting a finger to improve her state and relying on her neighbors who are getting more and more fed up with her dependency. Jennings gives an unflinching account of Deidre's daily activity, such as it is, and brings to shuddering life what it meant living in Cape Town during the drought. As crimes are unearthed at the site of Deidre's childhood home, she spirals deeper into borderline psychosis, her story alternating with snippets of her mother, across the street in elderly housing, suffering from dementia. This is powerful, visceral stuff, not to be taken lightly.
May 12, 2024
Deirdre van Deventer is a victim of everything: as a child, she lost her leg in an accident, and now the government has removed her from her family home in Cape Town to build a factory in its place.
She drinks too much, doesn't take care of herself, is broke and feels entitled to constantly demand help from those around her, without ever thanking them or giving anything back.
Then, one day, she gets a call from the police: certain items have been found on the terrain of her former house, if she can please come to 'identify' them. This triggers not only memories of the past, but also throws new light on some of the unresolved question marks of Deirdre's life.
It took me a few chapters to get into it, but then the story grabbed me. Jennings carefully navigates the past and present troubles of South Africa, from racism to corruption to water crisis.
She drinks too much, doesn't take care of herself, is broke and feels entitled to constantly demand help from those around her, without ever thanking them or giving anything back.
Then, one day, she gets a call from the police: certain items have been found on the terrain of her former house, if she can please come to 'identify' them. This triggers not only memories of the past, but also throws new light on some of the unresolved question marks of Deirdre's life.
It took me a few chapters to get into it, but then the story grabbed me. Jennings carefully navigates the past and present troubles of South Africa, from racism to corruption to water crisis.
April 27, 2024
A superb novel of the near future that delves into South Africa's complex recent history.
Cape Town of the late 2020s is a place strangled by drought, where Table Mountain burns and water is rationed. Into this simmering setting is placed Deidre, an amputee who scrapes out a vile existence and upsets almost everyone she comes into contact with. When a police officer calls to say they have made a gruesome discovery underneath her childhood home, Deidre must face the horrors of her past once again.
This is a tremendously bleak, visceral and troubling story, masterfully layered and told in stark, spare prose. It is a great follow up to An Island and cements Jennings's place as South Africa's successor to J.M. Coetzee.
Cape Town of the late 2020s is a place strangled by drought, where Table Mountain burns and water is rationed. Into this simmering setting is placed Deidre, an amputee who scrapes out a vile existence and upsets almost everyone she comes into contact with. When a police officer calls to say they have made a gruesome discovery underneath her childhood home, Deidre must face the horrors of her past once again.
This is a tremendously bleak, visceral and troubling story, masterfully layered and told in stark, spare prose. It is a great follow up to An Island and cements Jennings's place as South Africa's successor to J.M. Coetzee.
January 16, 2024
Cape Town in the near future...the lack of water availability colors all transactions. Deidra is an elderly woman living in public house - placed by the government after they reclaimed her family house.
It's a testament to Karen Jennings' abilities that the first few pages draw you in. The scene is not pretty but you cannot look away. As Deidre interacts with the local denizens we see that she is living on a thread and it is only by charming locals and garnering sympathy that she can get through her day.
Deidre's daily life is interrupted by the local detectives who have found something in or around the unclaimed house. Deidre is certain that this is something she has nothing to do with and wants to know nothing about. The detectives are working a case however and persist. This slow burn creates the spark needed to potentially burn what little Deidre has left.
Jennings is amazing and this was a master class in story telling!
#Crookedseeds #karenjennings
#Randomhouse
It's a testament to Karen Jennings' abilities that the first few pages draw you in. The scene is not pretty but you cannot look away. As Deidre interacts with the local denizens we see that she is living on a thread and it is only by charming locals and garnering sympathy that she can get through her day.
Deidre's daily life is interrupted by the local detectives who have found something in or around the unclaimed house. Deidre is certain that this is something she has nothing to do with and wants to know nothing about. The detectives are working a case however and persist. This slow burn creates the spark needed to potentially burn what little Deidre has left.
Jennings is amazing and this was a master class in story telling!
#Crookedseeds #karenjennings
#Randomhouse
March 4, 2025
Gifted by publisher
I feel like this has gone under the radar this year and I have to say that you guys are missing out. I read this in one sitting because I needed to know more about Deidre, who is firmly in the unlikeable character category. You know you’re in for a ride from the first page. Imagine the girl from MYORAR older, dirtier, definitely more bitter, and somewhere along the way she lost a leg in a terrible accident. Jennings uses sharp, spare prose to create a visceral and bleak experience, she almost wants to rub your face in it; she definitely doesn't want you to look away.
The land is literally burning around Deidre. It’s a near future in drought striken Cape Town and she, along with her neighbors, has lost her home after the government reclaimed the land to secure the aquifer found underneath the neighborhood. It’s been years and any government compensation is just a dream at this point. To Deidre, it’s just another thing in a long line of injustices. First her mother favors her brother, an explosion takes her leg, the vote in 1994 ends apartheid, her father dies, and her mother suffers with dementia in a senior home while Deidre lives in temporary public housing. It’s admittedly a lot and Deidre lets everyone know, you can see her making sure people notice her leg while she makes demands of them or cuts the line to get water rations.
One day a phone call brings a reckoning. Most of that plot happens off page, while we’re left in the muck with Deidre as she resists memories that will reveal family secrets. While this book works as an allegory, I found it a fascinating character study. Do we owe this woman who wallows in her own existence any sympathy?
I feel like this has gone under the radar this year and I have to say that you guys are missing out. I read this in one sitting because I needed to know more about Deidre, who is firmly in the unlikeable character category. You know you’re in for a ride from the first page. Imagine the girl from MYORAR older, dirtier, definitely more bitter, and somewhere along the way she lost a leg in a terrible accident. Jennings uses sharp, spare prose to create a visceral and bleak experience, she almost wants to rub your face in it; she definitely doesn't want you to look away.
The land is literally burning around Deidre. It’s a near future in drought striken Cape Town and she, along with her neighbors, has lost her home after the government reclaimed the land to secure the aquifer found underneath the neighborhood. It’s been years and any government compensation is just a dream at this point. To Deidre, it’s just another thing in a long line of injustices. First her mother favors her brother, an explosion takes her leg, the vote in 1994 ends apartheid, her father dies, and her mother suffers with dementia in a senior home while Deidre lives in temporary public housing. It’s admittedly a lot and Deidre lets everyone know, you can see her making sure people notice her leg while she makes demands of them or cuts the line to get water rations.
One day a phone call brings a reckoning. Most of that plot happens off page, while we’re left in the muck with Deidre as she resists memories that will reveal family secrets. While this book works as an allegory, I found it a fascinating character study. Do we owe this woman who wallows in her own existence any sympathy?
March 16, 2025
trying to read as many of the longlist nominees for the women's prize in fiction that i haven't already read. i didn't know what to expect with this but all i know is i liked it a lot more than i expected. incredible writing
August 5, 2024
Set in near future South Africa during a time of drought and wildfires, fifty-something Deidre van Deventer, a white woman, lives in a run-down public housing complex after her family’s home was reclaimed by the government. She is contacted by the police when bodies are found on that reclaimed property. Her brother was associated with a 1990s pro-apartheid terrorist group. Deidre was severely injured (at age 18) after a bomb exploded. Her brother has been gone ever since the explosion. Dierdre claims to be unaware of any of her brother’s actions. The storyline follows her reluctant participation in discovering her family’s secrets.
Deidre is a bitter woman. She believes she has had it rough in life, and places blame on everyone around her. She manipulates others to do her bidding. She views herself as a victim and acts in a very self-centered manner. She believes she deserves better in life but takes no responsibility to try to improve it. Her mother lives across the street but Dierdre never sees her. She is still angry over her mother favoring her brother when they were younger, believing he was the “special one” and Dierdre always felt inferior. We also find out she has a black daughter who has moved away.
It is well-written, and the topic is important and relevant, but reading it was unpleasant. The story is representative of South Africa’s reckoning with its history of colonialism and racism. Themes include generational trauma and collective guilt. I found it grim but at least there is a very tiny bit of optimism at the end. I read this book based on my positive reaction to the author’s previous book, An Island, which I prefer to this one.
Deidre is a bitter woman. She believes she has had it rough in life, and places blame on everyone around her. She manipulates others to do her bidding. She views herself as a victim and acts in a very self-centered manner. She believes she deserves better in life but takes no responsibility to try to improve it. Her mother lives across the street but Dierdre never sees her. She is still angry over her mother favoring her brother when they were younger, believing he was the “special one” and Dierdre always felt inferior. We also find out she has a black daughter who has moved away.
It is well-written, and the topic is important and relevant, but reading it was unpleasant. The story is representative of South Africa’s reckoning with its history of colonialism and racism. Themes include generational trauma and collective guilt. I found it grim but at least there is a very tiny bit of optimism at the end. I read this book based on my positive reaction to the author’s previous book, An Island, which I prefer to this one.
March 11, 2025
This is really dark and bleak, but a powerful book about violence and the scars it leaves. It's visceral and maybe a bit on the nose, but intriguing nonetheless.
Weaving together a future South Africa with water shortages and post apartheid communities, this tells the story of Deirdre, an amputee with depression and a drinking problem and what happens when she is confronted by the dark past of her brother. Apartheid not forgotten and the wounds are still raw.
This novel is pretty bleak and uses body horror to grab your attention to drive home the ugliness of its themes. It's quite unique, powerful and will stay with me.
Weaving together a future South Africa with water shortages and post apartheid communities, this tells the story of Deirdre, an amputee with depression and a drinking problem and what happens when she is confronted by the dark past of her brother. Apartheid not forgotten and the wounds are still raw.
This novel is pretty bleak and uses body horror to grab your attention to drive home the ugliness of its themes. It's quite unique, powerful and will stay with me.
April 24, 2025
3.25 stars
March 14, 2025
It came together somewhat, for me, in the end. The beginning (really all of it but especially the beginning) is just so gross and there’s very little plot in the first 80 pages to drive the story forward that it was hard to keep going.
The main character is extremely depressed and lives in a great deal of poverty. She is not likeable or even all that sympathetic to be honest. She lives in extreme filth and refuses to take care of herself. There’s imagery of elder abuse, talk about dead babies. Alcoholism. Some depictions of dementia. Loss of a limb. The whole thing is just hard to read beginning to end.
This is never going to be a favorite but I think I’m glad I finished? I’d probably be hesitant to read from Jennings again.
The main character is extremely depressed and lives in a great deal of poverty. She is not likeable or even all that sympathetic to be honest. She lives in extreme filth and refuses to take care of herself. There’s imagery of elder abuse, talk about dead babies. Alcoholism. Some depictions of dementia. Loss of a limb. The whole thing is just hard to read beginning to end.
This is never going to be a favorite but I think I’m glad I finished? I’d probably be hesitant to read from Jennings again.
April 19, 2024
From Instagram @jcgrenn_reads post
📚
Crooked Seeds
Karen Jennings
out 4/16
Thank you for sending me an advance copy, @hogarthbooks!
Crooked Seeds is grimy, sick and savory as it explores several days in the life of a woman who, just to say it plainly, has been the hell THROUGH IT.
I thought several times how much fearlessness and abandon it must have taken Jennings to go into the head and the life of a character who, while possible to deeply empathize with, also… good lord, no. What a butthole.
I understand I’d be similar had the events of my life led me to such a place, but it is with equal measures of supreme dislike and intense interest that I sped through the pages of this book. Truly, the main character here is one of the most vivid depictions of someone who’s become brittle-boned and loose-willed in the face of malnutrition, unmanaged trauma and major depressive disorder.
CS deftly and deeply explores memory, the loss of it, how dreaming and hallucinating and the use of drugs and alcohol alter the mental state and blend all of the above. You want to talk untrustworthy narrator? You got it. Yet, still, memory links every mind to their own perceived past, and memories rush on us all like waves in a storm.
I read the phrase “blisteringly alive” about another book recently. This applies here, too, but I really want to emphasize the BLISTER part. I also read @ronacharles ’ review on @goodreads (you should, too) and loved what he had to say about not reading to make friends. Definitely don’t read this to make a friend, but read it because it’s fricking good.
Something about the very end of CS left me scratching my head. Not in a bad way, but like the way a good song still can end on a flat note. I’m not saying it “fell flat” just that the ending worked but just gave me a mixed neutral feeling I can’t pinpoint.
Still— A resounding round of applause, a likely backlist purchase, a Booker longlist prediction, and a bucketload of stars from me.
Thanks again to @hogarthbooks @thebarandthebookcase and @davidebershoff sharing all this great literature with me. Forever grateful.
📚
Crooked Seeds
Karen Jennings
out 4/16
Thank you for sending me an advance copy, @hogarthbooks!
Crooked Seeds is grimy, sick and savory as it explores several days in the life of a woman who, just to say it plainly, has been the hell THROUGH IT.
I thought several times how much fearlessness and abandon it must have taken Jennings to go into the head and the life of a character who, while possible to deeply empathize with, also… good lord, no. What a butthole.
I understand I’d be similar had the events of my life led me to such a place, but it is with equal measures of supreme dislike and intense interest that I sped through the pages of this book. Truly, the main character here is one of the most vivid depictions of someone who’s become brittle-boned and loose-willed in the face of malnutrition, unmanaged trauma and major depressive disorder.
CS deftly and deeply explores memory, the loss of it, how dreaming and hallucinating and the use of drugs and alcohol alter the mental state and blend all of the above. You want to talk untrustworthy narrator? You got it. Yet, still, memory links every mind to their own perceived past, and memories rush on us all like waves in a storm.
I read the phrase “blisteringly alive” about another book recently. This applies here, too, but I really want to emphasize the BLISTER part. I also read @ronacharles ’ review on @goodreads (you should, too) and loved what he had to say about not reading to make friends. Definitely don’t read this to make a friend, but read it because it’s fricking good.
Something about the very end of CS left me scratching my head. Not in a bad way, but like the way a good song still can end on a flat note. I’m not saying it “fell flat” just that the ending worked but just gave me a mixed neutral feeling I can’t pinpoint.
Still— A resounding round of applause, a likely backlist purchase, a Booker longlist prediction, and a bucketload of stars from me.
Thanks again to @hogarthbooks @thebarandthebookcase and @davidebershoff sharing all this great literature with me. Forever grateful.
December 28, 2023
This book was not for me, admittedly. The book seemed promising with its setting in post-apartheid South Africa and the main character, Deidre, confronting her family's past. However, this doesn't really happen, nor does the subplot with her brother truly get brought up until you're about 68% into the book. Her brother's involvement in a pro-apartheid group was superficial at best and poorly handled (even if you try to throw in the topic of generational trauma, which also was superficial in this book). Nothing felt profound, especially because Deidre and almost everyone in this story are horribly unlikeable and unbearable, and the plot goes seemingly nowhere. There are also no consequences, so at a point, even our own character asks what the point of everything was.
Another issue I had with this book is the overt racism. Even taking into account the setting, story, characters, and more, it still feels so mishandled and problematic. It's even worse when you find out some of the characters helping Deidre (including her child) are black. While I will refrain from including quotes, I'm disappointed in the story.
Another issue I had with this book is the overt racism. Even taking into account the setting, story, characters, and more, it still feels so mishandled and problematic. It's even worse when you find out some of the characters helping Deidre (including her child) are black. While I will refrain from including quotes, I'm disappointed in the story.
November 7, 2023
Loved this book. Diedre. I found myself rooting for her, wanting to make things right. Will not forget this story. Definitely taking a look at this author’s The Island. Thank you for the book!
February 11, 2025
Longlisted for the 2025 Republic of Consciousness prize (UK)
I just finished this book, several hours after it arrived from Blackwell's across the pond. I Had not read any reviews before starting and was unable to put it down. It was such a shock that I wanted more than anything to talk to someone else who had read it (surely no one in Pennsylvania USA has). I was overjoyed to turn to Good Reads and find several excellent and thoughtful reviews. I won't repeat any of the interesting comments I read but just want to say how much it adds to my reading to have Good Reads! Now on to the rest of the list, or at least the 8 I was able to acquire
I just finished this book, several hours after it arrived from Blackwell's across the pond. I Had not read any reviews before starting and was unable to put it down. It was such a shock that I wanted more than anything to talk to someone else who had read it (surely no one in Pennsylvania USA has). I was overjoyed to turn to Good Reads and find several excellent and thoughtful reviews. I won't repeat any of the interesting comments I read but just want to say how much it adds to my reading to have Good Reads! Now on to the rest of the list, or at least the 8 I was able to acquire
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December 13, 2024The following reviews have been shared by Text Publishing - publisher of Crooked Seeds:
‘This is an extraordinary novel. It is shattering, almost bearable, yet—so good, so clear—it is unputdownable.’
Roddy Doyl
‘Karen Jennings’ Crooked Seeds has a moral and psychological precision that sharpens its examination of apartheid’s legacy, and affects a bleak study, unsparing but compassionate, of a character broken by trauma.’
Pick of the Week, Age
‘The past comes back to haunt a woman whose life is deteriorating in this powerful new novel from [South African] Booker Prize-longlisted author Jennings….With evocative prose and an apocalyptic setting, Jennings brings these complicated women to life while the world around them slowly crumbles. Readers will be captivated by this compelling novel about the corrosive power of family secrets.’
Booklist
‘This is simply a sensational piece of writing…A moving, confronting, and engrossing work of literature. 5 stars.’
GLAM Adelaide
‘An astonishing, beautifully written novel.’
Gleebooks
‘Crooked Seeds is masterful in its intent and execution and with it, Karen Jennings joins the ranks of South Africa's great writers.’
Sarah L’Estrange, ABC Arts
‘5 stars. This searing psychodrama grabs you by the throat.’
SA Weekend
‘[Crooked Seeds] stood out for its uncompromising vision: focusing on a bitter, broken white woman in post-apartheid South Africa, it fearlessly works difficult seams of entitlement and collective guilt.’
Guardian, Best Books of 2024
‘As short as it is devastating—a perfect match for our own bleak era, and a testament to the power of fiction to help us understand our own suffering, and our own sins. Of particular note: Jennings’ elegant use of nature’s depletion to underscore the moral failures of the self.’
CrimeReads
‘This is an extraordinary novel. It is shattering, almost bearable, yet—so good, so clear—it is unputdownable.’
Roddy Doyl
‘Karen Jennings’ Crooked Seeds has a moral and psychological precision that sharpens its examination of apartheid’s legacy, and affects a bleak study, unsparing but compassionate, of a character broken by trauma.’
Pick of the Week, Age
‘The past comes back to haunt a woman whose life is deteriorating in this powerful new novel from [South African] Booker Prize-longlisted author Jennings….With evocative prose and an apocalyptic setting, Jennings brings these complicated women to life while the world around them slowly crumbles. Readers will be captivated by this compelling novel about the corrosive power of family secrets.’
Booklist
‘This is simply a sensational piece of writing…A moving, confronting, and engrossing work of literature. 5 stars.’
GLAM Adelaide
‘An astonishing, beautifully written novel.’
Gleebooks
‘Crooked Seeds is masterful in its intent and execution and with it, Karen Jennings joins the ranks of South Africa's great writers.’
Sarah L’Estrange, ABC Arts
‘5 stars. This searing psychodrama grabs you by the throat.’
SA Weekend
‘[Crooked Seeds] stood out for its uncompromising vision: focusing on a bitter, broken white woman in post-apartheid South Africa, it fearlessly works difficult seams of entitlement and collective guilt.’
Guardian, Best Books of 2024
‘As short as it is devastating—a perfect match for our own bleak era, and a testament to the power of fiction to help us understand our own suffering, and our own sins. Of particular note: Jennings’ elegant use of nature’s depletion to underscore the moral failures of the self.’
CrimeReads
August 13, 2024
A Moshfeghian bodily ickyness cut with an exact opposite of Armfield's Private Rites. Excellent, except for a too neat ending.
March 15, 2025
This is not an easy book to read because the protagonist is unredeemably dislikable and absolutely physically degraded as well, living in conditions of vividly described squalor. Nonetheless, it is very well done and its few pages fly by. There appear to be lots of metaphors for South Africa’s brutal past and precarious present at work but it would take someone with more than my facile understanding of recent events there to unpack them.
April 15, 2025
should have quit as soon as they started pronouncing Deirdre as deer-dray
March 6, 2025
What an unexpected hit! I would have never read this if it weren't for the Women's Prize, and I am so glad I did. This was gritty, gross, and packed an emotional punch. What an interesting, roundabout, fever dream way to tell a story.
February 17, 2025
I read this one because it was Holland House Books' longlisted selection for the 2025 Republic of Consciousness Small Press Prize (UK & Ireland).
Set in South Africa, the book centers around Deirdre, a rather unlikeable main character. We should feel sorry for her (she's disabled, thanks to having lost a leg in childhood to one of her brother's improvised explosive devices; and, she's displaced by her government into pretty rough public housing), but we don't. She's so traumatized and caught up in her victimhood that she makes most of her life worse than it has to be and yet the narrative compels the reader along in search of the history that brought her to this moment. It weaves the personal with the national, exploring grief and loss, while a nation reckons with the horrors of the past. The voice and the details are edgy and rough with the prose immersing you in the city as if you were part of Deirdre's daily struggles.
If this is at all indicative of the longlist as a whole, it looks like another great year (the 9th!) for the RoC Prize (I'm not a huge literary prize person, but this one remains my favorite). I definitely want to read more books by Jennings.
Set in South Africa, the book centers around Deirdre, a rather unlikeable main character. We should feel sorry for her (she's disabled, thanks to having lost a leg in childhood to one of her brother's improvised explosive devices; and, she's displaced by her government into pretty rough public housing), but we don't. She's so traumatized and caught up in her victimhood that she makes most of her life worse than it has to be and yet the narrative compels the reader along in search of the history that brought her to this moment. It weaves the personal with the national, exploring grief and loss, while a nation reckons with the horrors of the past. The voice and the details are edgy and rough with the prose immersing you in the city as if you were part of Deirdre's daily struggles.
If this is at all indicative of the longlist as a whole, it looks like another great year (the 9th!) for the RoC Prize (I'm not a huge literary prize person, but this one remains my favorite). I definitely want to read more books by Jennings.
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