Wals met Matilda

Koos once sold more historical novels than anyone, but since losing his wife Cornelia, his daughter, her husband and his granddaughter he has written nothing worth printing. Drinking, rude and sour, he holds out in a seaside flat in Milnerton that belongs to his publisher, which now wants him out, while below his balcony a blue outline on the paving shows where a man landed after his fatal fall. As a last resort the firm sends Carelina van der Merwe: once a schoolteacher, now a speech therapist and editor, and a fierce guardian of Afrikaans. She wants no favours, only to make him write again, and she spares him pity. Between them lies the novel he erased line by line in a night of grief, about Japie van der Merwe and where the song of Matilda really came from.

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About the book

Form

Novel

Length

397 pages in the original

First published

2011 by Tafelberg

ISBN

9780624051466 (original)