Why read Imaginings of Sand?

Book cover of Imaginings of Sand

Book description

When expatriate Afrikaner Kristien Müller hears of her grandmother's impending death, she ends her self-imposed exile in London and returns to the South Africa she thought she'd escaped. But irrevocable change is sweeping the land, and reality itself seems to be in flux as the country stages its first democratic…

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Literary fiction

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Why read it?

1 author picked Imaginings of Sand as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Gretchen McCullough

Author

I admired the creativity and originality of this epic novel. Brink has yoked the harsh political reality of South Africa with the frame of the One Hundred and One Nights.

On the eve of cataclysmic change in nineties South Africa, a young South African émigré, Kristien, who lives in London, has been summoned back to her grandmother’s deathbed. In between the tense atmosphere before impending elections in post-apartheid South Africa, the ancient Ouma tells her granddaughter the history of all of the women in their Afrikaans family, blending fable, African folktale, and actual fact. One relative even turns…

From Gretchen's list on The best books influenced by Thousand and One Nights.