Diane Awerbuck teaches high school English and History to Cape Town schoolgirls. She knows that someday she will have to go back to Kimberley. Gardening at Night won the 2004 Commonwealth Best First Book Award (Africa and the Caribbean), and was shortlisted for the International Dublin IMPAC Award. She is also author of a collection of short stories, Cabin Fever (2011), and the novel Home Remedies (2012).
What sets this story of a girl's coming of age apart from the myriad others is the quality of the writing, an immediacy, wisdom and wry self-knowledge that are not the hallmarks of many more casual fictional memoirs. Set in the once-flourishing mining town of Kimberley in late 20th-century South Africa, the story reveals itself gradually and occasionally obliquely, excavated from its source in pieces, with dreams and flashbacks informing the here and now. There is a strong autobiographical feel to the book, not just because the heroine shares her author's name, but thanks to a truth in the nuances and a rawness in the feelings she expresses. The mood is not always upbeat, but is liberally peppered with ironic asides and comic character sketches and incidents. After a stormy and mismatched marriage, Diane's father dies, and it isn't long before she and her brother find themselves with a new stepfather and step-siblings, yoked together with nothing in common but the piece of paper that unites their parents. Escape is the only option - to university and then to Cape Town, into new and not necessarily more satisfactory relationships than those she sought to escape: 'I have arrived with my suitcases of hopeful underwear. Not my father's house, but my lover's. I have lugged my trousseau of dirty jokes and university degrees, feeling like Nancy Drew, Girl Detective, thinking, I could be happy, higher up.' But wherever she travels, home exerts its pull and escape has a temporary feel to it, informed by being like or unlike the place and the people that formed her. Awerbuck writes with confidence and a sure touch - we will hear more from her. (Kirkus UK)