Sirkusboere

St. Louis, 1904. In Frank Fillis’s Boer War show the showman Ben roars through his megaphone about the mightiest military spectacle on earth and the heroes who have come from the far ends of southern Africa to fight once more for the audience’s delight. The cheering dies down when a silent man walks out of the smoke, trailed by a hesitant woman and a weeping groom. Head lowered, General Piet Cronjé acts out his surrender at Paardeberg twice a day, and when the guns go off he is back on that battlefield. Why would he, or the many veterans like him, sell their trauma as entertainment? And what is the restless Ben Viljoen plotting? Cronjé clings to his shame, Viljoen sloughs off history, Fillis treats life as a circus, and past and present begin to merge.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Novel

Length

379 pages in the original

Genres

Historical, War (assigned by AI)

Set in

United States

First published

2011 by Tafelberg

ISBN

9780624053354 (original)