The Troubled Times of Magrieta Prinsloo

One January morning in Stellenbosch, a wrongly dosed antidepressant tips Magrieta Prinsloo, a respected zoologist who runs a laboratory and researches how earthworms evolved, into a black fury. She rebuffs her husband, hurls abuse at her superior and walks out on her career. With nowhere else to go, she takes an office job at the Bureau for Continuing Education, where the director, Markus Potsdam, runs things in secret and she is sent to meet "agents" in odd places for reasons no one explains. Trying to read this web of links, she cannot be sure what is real and what her shaken mind supplies. Around her, others are lost too: a wheelchair-bound scientist of ancient climates reading Heidegger, and a woman in the vineyards where Magrieta walks her dog, perhaps a runaway from her own family.

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About the book

Form

Novel

Length

196 pages in the original

Set in

South Africa

First published

2018 by Human & Rousseau

Author's age

70 when first published

ISBN

9780798177665 (original)

9780798179263 (Human & Rousseau, South Africa)