Devil's Valley - Andre Brink

When Flip Lochner, a seedy, tired journalist fleeing a failed marriage, sees a beautiful woman with four breasts in Devil's Valley, he thinks it's a mirage. But then a man called Lukas Death stands before him. So begins Lochner's search for "the truth" first hinted at by a young student in Cape Town who was mysteriously killed. Lochner meets Lukas Death's clan, where righteousness prevails by day and depravity by night, where punishment for misdemeanours is summary, yet brutal murderers walk unscathed. Everyone has a story, and yet no one tells the story, the story of Little-Lukas and Emma, the woman with the four breasts-the uneasy reminder of a secret hidden collectively by the valley people. Nothing in Devil's Valley is as it seems: the supernatural is an ingredient of everyday, the living and the dead are never quite separate, the grotesque coexists with the banal. Vibrant and darkly humorous, Devil's Valley is splendid entertainment from a master storyteller.

ISBN: 9780436275036

Pages: 372

Trade paperback

Secker & Warburg, 1998

Fair/Good condition; Pages edges foxed/tanned; Cover foxed

B85