A Blade of Grass - Man Booker Longlist!

Lewis DeSoto
HarperCollins Canada

Man Booker Longlist!

Rights sold:
Australia, NZ/HarperCollins,
Czech Rep./Euromedia Group,
France/Plon,
Germany/Bertelsmann,
Italy/Bompiani,
The Netherlands/ECI House of Books,
Poland/Swiat Ksiazki,
Portugal/Circulo de Leitores,
Slovak Rep./Ikar a.s.,
Spain/Circulo de Lectores,
UK/The Maia Press
US/Ecco Press.

In addition, book club rights have sold to France Loisirs in France, Bookspan in the US, BCA Direct in the UK and to Bertelsmann in Spain.


A universal story of the price of freedom, a tale both terrifying and hopeful, A Blade of Grass is a taut story of two women, one white and one black, who struggle to save their farm and, ultimately, their lives. A Blade of Grass has just been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

The Man Booker Prize for Fiction represents the very best in contemporary fiction. One of the world’s most prestigious awards, and one of incomparable influence, it continues to be the pinnacle of ambition for every fiction writer. It has the power to transform the fortunes of authors, and even publishers.
Now in its thirty-fifth year, the prize aims to reward the best novel of the year written by a citizen of the Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland. The Man Booker judges are selected from the country’s finest critics, writers and academics to maintain the consistent excellence of the prize.

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.

About the author:
Lewis DeSoto was born in Bloemfontein, South Africa, to a family that arrived from Europe in the eighteenth century. His writing has been published in numerous journals, and he was awarded the Books in Canada/Writers’ Union Short Prose Award. A past editor of Literary Review of Canada, Lewis DeSoto lives with his wife in Normandy and Toronto.

Quotes and reviews:

"This fine first novel is tension-filled and swiftly paced."
--Library Journal

"[A] beautiful first novel."
--Booklist

"[A] quietly intense first novel."
--Vancouver Sun

"Resembles in loose fashion our own master Faulkner’s… novel The Unvanquished.… An intense reading experience… something readers will remember."
--Chicago Tribune

"A Blade of Grass never falters. It is quite simply a master work by a mature and powerful new voice."
--Ottawa Citizen

From Booklist
Part historical fiction, part war-survivor story, this beautiful first novel is above all an intimate drama of two young South African women who cross apartheid barriers in their search for home. The time is the 1970s somewhere near the border. When the civil war comes close and a farmer is killed, his widow refuses to leave with the other whites. Her housekeeper, Tembi, is the only black person to stay on when the government soldiers drive away her people. The story is told from the women’s alternating viewpoints as they break down the mistress-servant relationship, care for each other, and work the land, even when they lose electricity, running water, crops, cattle, and all outside contact. Tembi’s voice is sometimes too distant, but her personal story brings close the apartheid atrocity of family breakup. With lyrical simplicity, DeSoto evokes the elemental landscape of the veldt that survives even the screaming military jets. In the tradition of Olive Schreiner’s classic Story of an African Farm (1883), the focus is on women, their loneliness and strength. Hazel Rochman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

The Story Behind the Book
In one of those moments of reverie, half-dream, half-waking, that sometimes come just before sleep, I saw an image of a woman walking on a dusty road in the African countryside, in the country of my youth. Her hair was shorn, she walked barefoot, and although she was a white woman, she wore the clothes of a rural farm-worker. Such an air of tragedy emanated from her that the image lodged itself deeply in my consciousness, haunting me for days afterwards. She seemed to be someone I knew, to have her origin in my own life. This was the woman who became Märit.
I did not wander where this woman was walking to, because I knew somehow that she walked towards the future. I wondered instead where she had come from, what she had left, why she walked alone. As I retraced her steps in my imagination, along that dusty road, following the imprints of her bare feet in the sand, I saw a farm, a white-walled house with a thatched straw roof, a windmill turning in the breeze over the corn fields. And standing in front of the house was another woman, a young black woman, shading her eyes against the glare as she peered into the distance where the road disappeared towards the hills. On her face was an expression of longing, and of hope. This was Tembi.
These images arose out of the depths of my memory, out of emotions that had been lodged in my soul, still there after countless years, after departure, after exile, after the creation of another life in another country. Still the taste of dust on my lips, still the smell of wood-smoke from early morning cooking fires, still the sound of the cicadas in the long grass. And still the longing and the hope. The tragedy that Märit carried with her and the yearning that was on Tembi’s face were in my heart too.
When my wife read the manuscript she remarked that Märit reminded her of descriptions of my mother. Shortly after I left South Africa my mother died. Because of the circumstances of my childhood I never knew her very well. Looking at Märit now, I do see that the elusiveness of her inner character, and the air of melancholy that she carries owes a great deal to my memory of my mother.
Some readers of the book have asked why I, as a man, have chosen to write from the perspective of two women. History, in fiction as in reality, has been a stage dominated by men. Sometimes I feel that male characters in books can no longer surprise us. But women are still capable, as characters in fiction, to do the unexpected, to set out on the uncharted journeys of discovery. At the same time, I believe it is true that women are more sensitive to the emotional nuances of situations, and more expressive of the effects of those emotions. Also, for me as a writer, to create characters that are mostly unlike myself is a method to retain some objectivity in the creation, so that the book is more art and less self confession.
A Blade of Grass is written out of memory, not the facts of history but the emotions caused by history. At the heart of the book is a simple question: Where is home? All the characters and all the actions are driven by this question. Where do I lay my head at night to sleep undisturbed and wake to serenity and peace? The anxiety that comes from not being able to answer the question is what gives the book its air of tension, and its tragedy.
I could not write this book until apartheid had ended in South Africa. Not for any political reason, but because apartheid had put a lock on my memory and my imagination. To write a book about South Africa while the system of racial oppression existed would have meant writing a political book, as an act and a statement. But there were other voices, better able than mine, more urgent, more desperate, that were speaking the necessary truths in those years. With the breaking of the chains that strangled the country came a release in my own heart, a return from an exile that allowed me to cease mourning, and to believe in the future again.
The language and style of the book have an intentional cadence and rhythm that owes a great deal to the Bible. During my childhood I was very moved by the narratives of the Old Testament. Tembi and Märit seem to me to exist in that elemental, almost archaic landscape. Their story of struggle and sacrifice and exile is an old, old one, yet it continues to this day, all over the world, still being created and played out in the lives of those who still ask, Where is home?
Home is not only a physical place, it is very much where the heart rests. The attempt at friendship between the two women, Märit and Tembi, of such disparate backgrounds, with so many impediments standing between them, is also an attempt to find a home - a home for the spirit and the heart, where both hope and love can exist.