30 Nights in Amsterdam

Henk de Melker, a timid museum curator in Somerset East who grew up near Graaff-Reinet and writes slim studies of overlooked lives, learns by letter that his half-forgotten Aunt Zan has made him her heir. Before he can accept, he must live in her Amsterdam house for thirty nights and decide whether to stay. The telling alternates between Henk, seen from outside, and Zan in her own voice: epileptic, theatrical, the family’s black sheep, who defied the narrow, conservative world of the 1960s with her body and her tongue and threw herself into the underground fight against apartheid. Between the Karoo of their youth, presided over by the matriarch MaOlivier, and the canals of Amsterdam, one buried family secret after another comes out, along with the question of where anyone truly belongs.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Novel

Length

448 pages in the original

Genres

Family (assigned by AI)

Set in

South Africa, Netherlands

First published

2008 by Tafelberg

Author's age

54 when first published

ISBN

9780624047070 (original)

9780143528739 (Penguin, South Africa)