A Blade Of Grass DeSoto, Lewis

Product Description Märit is a young woman from the city, recently orphaned, recently married, now living on a farm in the remote South African countryside. Although she should be enjoying her station in life, she feels isolated and disconnected from the land, its black workers and the local Afrikaaner farming community, which clings to the traditions of its forefathers. Tembi is also a young woman, the farm’s new housekeeper. Like Märit, Tembi feels isolated among her people, separated by her interest in books and the pain in her heart. Tembi knows her life will never be her own. The policies of apartheid have uprooted her family from their land, banished her father and played a hand in the death of her mother. Then, in a single shattering moment, Märit’s life changes forever, and her fate becomes inexorably tied to her country’s increasingly violent civil struggle. Despite their vast differences, Märit feels drawn to Tembi, the only person she can rely on. Caught in a quickly escalating war between the Afrikaaners and the black guerrillas, torn by their own conflicting loyalties, Märit and Tembi engage in what begins as a struggle to save their farm—and ends in a fight to save their lives. A powerful and disturbing story of friendship and betrayal, A Blade of Grass transcends its time and setting to become a universal story that reveals the true price of freedom. Lewis DeSoto has written a spare and beautifully lyrical novel, taut with undercurrents of suspense and sensuality. This is a book to remember and a writer to be noticed. From Amazon Lewis De Soto's debut novel, A Blade of Grass, tells the story of Marit Laurens, a young woman of British descent, recently orphaned, who has moved with her new husband Ben to a remote farm on the contested borderland between South Africa and an unnamed country. When Ben is killed by a bomb in an act of guerilla warfare, she decides to stay on and run the farm. Alone in the world, she befriends Tembi, the daughter of her black housemaid, who has also been killed, in an accident. Struggling to transform herself as the surrounding countryside descends into bloody conflict, Marit finds herself caught between the fear and prejudices of the local Afrikaner community and the shifting loyalties and growing feeling of entitlement of the indigenous black workers. When first the Afrikaners and then the blacks flee the area, and the outside world starts to encroach menacingly on the isolated farm, Marit is stripped of everything that gave her a sense of self and a sense of belonging to this place. A Blade of Grass is a delicate, if at times naively sentimental, exploration of the arc of a courageous relationship between two women from different societies, each an outcast from her own, during the death throes of apartheid: from the rigid structure of master and servant, through the tenderness of the shared experience of aloneness and defiance in the face of societal pressures, to betrayal. De Soto has transformed the quiet immensity of the South African veldt into spare, luminous prose. He contains everything--repression and ownership, belonging and loss, humiliation and hope--in the small gesture, the seed, the blade of grass. The story's brutality is barely graphic in its depiction, but the terror is present nonetheless, lurking insistently beneath the surface, waiting at the edge of the farm. --Diana Kuprel Quill & Quire A Blade of Grass, the first novel from Toronto writer and painter Lewis DeSoto, is an impressive, if flawed, debut, a compelling examination of race and place, the personal and the political, in South Africa. DeSoto, a South African immigrant, pulls no punches and offers no platitudes in this harrowing account, not only of relations between the races under apartheid but also of relations within the races, between Boers and British-descended newcomers, between black revolutionaries and farm-workers. Newlyweds Ben and Marit are new arrivals to the rich farming country in nort