The Great Karoo by John Howland Beaumont

Softcover published by David Philip

Neat copy. Name written in front cover.

This is one of those rare books of genuine imagination which operated on several different levels. On the surface, it is simply a collection of delicate, often heart-breaking, small stories about life on a South African farm. But John Beaumont is above all a poet, and his eye is so keen and his compassion, for man or animal, so exact that the work as a whole assumes almost visionary intensity; and his landscape and characters build up into a comprehensive mythology which is at once strange and instantly familiar. So an account of a farm in the Great Karoo is soon seen to be much more than that: it is in fact a new treatment of the great paradisiac theme, complete with its own wonder and warnings.