When South African author Anne Landsman says that writing her stunning novel, The Devils Chimney (Soho Press) , was like dreaming," she isn't kidding.

Hubris, madness and ruin in South Africa come urgently alive in Landsman's im-pressive debut. The physical terrain of the Karoo region and the country's...

This book by a South African expatriate, due to be published in the US shortly, suggests that the critic Fredric Jameson may not have been so far wrong when he put for-ward that magic realism has become the literary language of the emergent post- colonial world.

First-time author Anne Landsman grew up in Worcester, 'but that wasn't the real me', Writing about her novel The Devil's Chimney (Soho Press)

Set in the vast, harsh landscape of the South African veld, Anne Landsman's remarkable first novel is a transforming allegory of passion and transgression, retribution and redemption.

This first novel, narrated by the alcoholic, semideranged Connie Lambrechht, brings to mind the parabolic prose of Alice Munro and the scarifying vision of J.

The Devil's Chimney is an allegory for the structure of South African society in this century. The novel's spine is a set of rumbling racial distinctions tacked up like old bricks...