Excerpt from Cape Fever by Nadia Davids, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

ONE

23 Heron Place
The Cape
Southern Cross Colony

March 12, 1920

I come highly recommended to Mrs. Hattingh through sentences I tell her I cannot read. She conducts the interview in her kitchen, a large room on a street of houses grand and gabled that look out onto the dipped bowl of our harbor city. A row of homes, my father told me, for doctors and ambassadors. When she says the position is for a combined cleaner-cook, I realize she is not as wealthy as her house—its address and ornaments—suggests. I glance past the kitchen door to the corridor, and though the light is dim I notice rows of variously sized rectangles, solid blocks of deep maroon, shades darker than the rest of the wallpaper. Paintings must once have hung there. Perhaps she has had to sell them, and now the memory of each casts a precise and permanent shadow. It is likely she lost part of her fortune in the war. Well, who hasn't? Even those of us who had no fortune to begin with have felt the pinch and scrape and cost of all those trenches and guns and explosions. The kitchen, however, is still well equipped. In the end, as my mother would say, it is the pots, not the paintings, that survive.

So here we are, in the room in which I will be expected to collude in her deceits, concoct dishes for dinner parties that hide her poverty, mind the number of eggs, keep up appearances. I can do that. I am used to culinary economy, to careful pride.

She is holding the letter up to a wide window, squinting with effort as though the words will unfurl in the morning light. The paper is thin as a breeze, the writing as spidery as my previous employer Mrs. Edenburg's spite.

Mrs. Hattingh asks me the usual questions, her voice now firm, now breathless. "How old are you, girl?"

"Nineteen, madam."

"You look younger. I suppose it is because you are so slight. How long have you been in service?"

"Since I was twelve, madam. First as a scullery maid and then as Cook's helper."

"Why did you leave the Edenburgs? Such a glowing reference, I can't imagine why they'd let you go."

To this I say that Cook had never liked me, that she'd wanted my position for her own daughter, that she'd connived to get rid of me! I touch a finger to my lips; days ago, it had been swollen to a bloody pout, but it's calmed since, just a small bump now, dark and tender. Don't worry, my mother had said when she first saw it, the mouth heals quickly.

"I do hope she taught you to cook before all this intrigue?" Around Mrs. Hattingh's mouth a smile dances.

"Oh yes, madam. I helped Cook for three years. She taught me the settlers' dishes and my mother taught me our food."

"But how wonderful! Can you make that lovely spiced mince dish with dried mint… kee… kee… the name escapes me now."

"Keema. Yes, madam."

"What about the almond dessert with rose water? And cardamom doughnuts?"

I nod.

"Excellent. We shall get along famously. I always hire your people if I can help it, Soraya. I've long admired the skilled cleverness of your men and the industriousness and modesty of your women, even if some say the former is merely cunning and the latter crippling shyness."

"Yes, madam. Thank you, madam."

"In fact"—she leans forward and drops her voice even though there is no one about to hear us—"I feel a kinship with your people. You are not really from here either. Yes, yes, brought by force where we came by design, but still, like us, your kind made this colony what it is."

Ah, she's one of those, the ones who think themselves infinitely better than us and us somewhat better than the others, and believes that sharing this will inspire my loyalty, hard work, thankfulness. My mother—herself descended in part from the First People Mrs. Hattingh so easily dismisses—would have given one of her stock responses, such as We are hard workers indeed, but I say nothing. Let her make of that what she may.

Excerpted from Cape Fever by Nadia Davids. Copyright © 2025 by Nadia Davids. Excerpted by permission of Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.