1795

At the Cape in 1795, William Ferdinand van Reede van Oudtshoorn, whose father died at sea on his way to govern the colony, presides over the Council of Justice’s commissioners, runs the Company’s grain stores and commands its corps of clerks. A keen reader devoted to the colony he calls home, he is the first to grasp that the English fleet in the bay is a real danger. Ranged against his efforts to prepare a defence are the feeble governor Sluysken and Colonel Gordon, a vain, polished singer many townspeople take for a fraud, whose double game in the castle’s councils grows ever harder to miss. Alongside the politics runs William’s inner life: grief for his first love, a wretched marriage to the half-mad Geesje, and new love for Madame de Remony.

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About the book

Form

Novel

Genres

Historical, Politics (assigned by AI)

Set in

South Africa, 1795

First published

2016 by Tafelberg

ISBN

9780624073307 (original)