Bitter Aloes: Stories from the Eastern Cape

Description

You would think not much ever happens in the sleepy towns and dusty pineapple valleys of South Mrica’s eastern cape, yet look deeper. On shade-dappled farmhouse porches and in the back rooms of rented settler-era cottages in Fort Beaufort, stories unfold every day. Stories of loss, love, betrayal, obsession … and fish. In the last decades of the 2oth century, author Marion Baxter cut a solitary and eccentric figure in provincial society, whose introspection belied a pen that wouldn’t stop writing about the people and places around her. An author is, above all, an observer – and Baxter’s writings stand as a high definition showcase of the place and time where she lived out her latter years. Baxter passed away from advanced breast cancer in july 2002, leaving behind a stack of neatly filed manuscripts in her small Rhodes University office. This volume of stories was on the top.