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Agaat
“I was immediately mesmerized . . . as brilliant as it is haunting.” —Toni Morrison
In 1940s apartheid South Africa, Milla de Wet discovers a child abandoned in the fields of her family farm. Ignoring the warnings of friends and family, Milla brings the girl, Agaat, into her home. But the kindness is fleeting, as Milla makes Agaat her maidservant and, later, a nanny for her son. At turns cruel and tender, this relationship between a wealthy white woman and her Black maidservant is constantly fraught and shaped by a rigid social order.
Decades later, Milla is confined to her bed with ALS, and is quickly losing her ability to communicate. Her family has fallen apart, her country is on the brink of change, and all she has left are her memories—and a reckoning with the only person who remains by her side: Agaat. In complex and devastating ways, the power shifts between the two women, mirroring the historic upheavals happening around them and revealing a shared lifetime of hopes, sacrifices, and control.
Hailed as an international masterpiece, Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat is a haunting and deeply layered saga of resilience, loyalty, betrayal, and how the passage of time cannot heal all wounds.
Praise
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The most important South African novel since Coetzee’s Disgrace.
—The Times Literary Supplement
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Books like Agaat . . . are the reason people read novels, and the reason authors write them.
—The New York Times Book Review
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This is a frank novel about a white South African landowner and her lifelong servant in a radically changing country.
—O, The Oprah Magazine
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One of the most extraordinary works that I have ever encountered. . . . van Niekerk exposes all of the nuances of the women’s fraught and volatile relationship with language that is brutally raw, honest, and uncommonly beautiful. Simply a masterpiece.
—Words Without Borders
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A family saga of mothers and daughters . . . and a poetic exploration of control and the loss of control. It’s a stylishly inventive book.
—The Rumpus
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A beautiful, complicated epic of agrarian life in South Africa from 1948 onward. . . . The book’s relevance to today’s racism and violence are coldly apparent.
—BUST
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Wonderful.
—Good Housekeeping
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Momentous. . . . It is an allegory of colonial exploitation, apartheid, and the precarious steps towards reconciliation.
—The Independent
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This novel stuns.
—Booklist, Starred Review
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An innovative epic.
—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
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Agaat is a tangle of language and rhyme, of wordplay and digressions. . . . Both absorbing in its minutiae and provocative in its allegorical approach to apartheid, Agaat explodes the domestic sphere to encompass the world.
—The Portland Mercury
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In addition to its vivid emotional resonance, Agaat is notable for the wealth of detail it imparts about rural life in South Africa before industrialized farming.
—Hemispheres
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Fascinating and moving, this is, above all, a love story.
—The Times
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van Niekerk has created a work of stunning breadth and emotional potency.
—Publishing Perspectives
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A masterpiece has arrived.
—South African Sunday Times
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