In the hope that she’ll be back soon, I stay and watch her chest rise and fall beneath the ugly hospital gown they have given to her to wear.īut Gigi remains absent, and the story howls at me again, even louder. I try Gigi first, but my daughter is lost and floating on a chemical sea and is not, it would seem, present in the story herself right now. Listen to me.Īnd so I look for an opening, a beginning to grab on to . . . Perhaps I have no choice but to follow the story to its end. I look closer to find that this small, bright thread of story weaves out from the moment of my passing and seems to tether me to this place. It is howling at me, raging, demanding my attention. It’s just one story amongst millions, and yet it has become so loud now that it drowns out the others. This small story has my living blood still in it: I can sense it pulsing through the body of my sister (who now sits weeping at her dressing table) and fluttering alongside the tranquilizers in the veins of my daughter as she lies between the white and blue sheets of a hospital bed. It is a pale, slender thread with an escalating alarmed tone, like the call of a hornbill looking for love.
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Some of these stories are ancient and wear fossilized coats of red dust, and others are so fresh that they gleam with umbilical wetness, and it would seem that, like me, they’re all bound here, even the stories that are full of violence and blood and fury, and there are many of those.Īt first, I couldn’t distinguish one story thread from another within the solid roaring wall of sound, but now one of them seems to have separated itself from the rest. Millions upon millions of them, some told in descending liquid notes like the call of the Burchells’ coucal before the rain, and some like the dull roar of Johannesburg traffic.
The noise comes from Africa’s stories being told. It has taken me a while to work out what the whispering, humming, singing, screaming awfulness comes from, but now, on my third day of not being Sally anymore, I think I have it figured out. I go higher, high enough to see where the layer of blue above me turns into black, but the only thing that changes is the noise. Far off in one direction, I can see the white frill of surf that borders the dark turquoise of the Indian Ocean.īut there’s no sign, no “snap,” no tunnel. Exit ahead.” From way up here, southern Africa looks like a creature that’s rolled over to expose the vast curve of a mottled brown belly with a gray tracery of veins.
I try going as high up away from the ground as possible to see if I can pass a point where things will suddenly snap into place and a tunnel will open and there will be a big glossy sign saying, “Afterlife. I always thought that when the moment came, I’d follow the light or join the stars or whatever it is that’s supposed to happen, but I have been dead for three sunrises, and I am still here. Now, I no longer have fingers of any kind, or nails to break when helping Johan and Phineas fix the wire fencing around the perimeter of the farm, or any fences to fix, for that matter.īut something seems to have gone wrong with my dying. WHEN I was alive, I had hair that was white in summer and the color of dead grass in winter and long, too-skinny fingers that, early on, earned me the nickname Monkey. Now Sally must find a way to prevent her daughter from making a mistake that could destroy the lives of all who are left behind.Ī suspenseful drama focusing on marriage and fidelity, sisterhood, and the fractious bond between mothers and daughters-and set in a contemporary, urban world that belies a simmering wildness- Black Dog Summer is a gorgeously written debut, with a pace that will leave you breathless. Gigi’s fragile healing process is derailed when she receives some shattering news, and in an effort to protect her cousin instead puts the girl in imminent danger. When her young niece develops an obsession with African magic, Sally calls upon their neighbor Lesedi, the beautiful, modern-day witch doctor, who can communicate with the dead and plies her trade in secret behind the closed gates and high walls of their affluent suburb. When Gigi’s trauma stirs up long-buried secrets, Sally watches helplessly from the beyond as the family unravels. When Gigi moves in with her aunt’s family in Johannesburg, Sally comes too. She lingers unseen in her daughter’s shadow. Now Sally is dead, and Gigi is alone in the world.
Yesterday, Sally and her teenage daughter Gigi were living a charmed bohemian life in the African bush. Miranda Sherry instantly became “a writer to watch” ( Kirkus Reviews) with her extraordinary debut novel reminiscent of The Lovely Bones and Little Bee, about a murdered woman who observes from the afterlife as her teenage daughter, the sole survivor of a farm massacre, recovers from the trauma amidst a family’s startling dysfunction.
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