Another country - Karel Schoeman

Versluis, a solitary, well-off, rather rigid Dutchman, travels to Bloemfontein because he has tuberculosis. Here he comes into contact with fellow sufferers also seeking a cure, with the people who make up the white community of the raw little town, with the veldt—a landscape of silence and peace...

Set in the 1870s, this fine novel is translated (by David Schalkwyk) from the Afrikaans. It comes to readers of English heralded by such fellow writers as J.M. Coetzee, who praises Schoeman’s ‘great achievement,’ ‘superlative art,’ and ‘magnificent prose.’

Can a white man, a settler from another country, become an African? Can a dying man accept the fact of his own death? Another Country is hugely ambitious in its themes: it is about living and dying and language and identity. Above all, it is suffused with the spirit of Africa. Fiction on a grand scale, it has the pace and dignity of a nineteenth-century novel.