The House on Sugarbush Road

Book excerpt: The House on Sugarbush Road, set in post--apartheid Johannesburg shortly after the 1994 election of Nelson Mandela, is the story of the intertwining lives of a once prominent liberal Afrikaner family and Beauty Mapule, their domestic servant of more than thirty years. Cook's intimately interconnected and finely drawn characters are white, black, rich, poor, beautiful, ugly, old and young; they are also hustlers, do--gooders, petty criminals and sensualists, heading towards dramatic explosions both inevitable and unexpected.