Karen Jennings

An Island, longlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize, is a powerful and suspenseful literary novel set on an island off the African coast. While the story takes place across four days, it reveals the echoes of decades of civil war, rebellion, and loss. Samuel is now an old man. For many years he has lived alone on a small island...

A woman in post-apartheid South Africa confronts her family's troubled past in this taut and compelling novel from the Booker Prize longlisted author of An Island. In her parched, crumbling corner of a Cape Town public housing complex, Deidre van Deventer receives a call from the police. The remains of several bodies have just been unearthed from her family's former...

From the Booker and Women's Prize long-listed author comes a novel about the week leading up to the moment all slaves were freed in South Africa. First of December is set in the momentous week leading up to midnight on 1 December 1838, the day that South Africa's slaves were finally emancipated. Karen Jennings' compelling novel tells this story of...