Nightwatching

Meira Cook

May 2015 · HarperCollins

About this ebook

One hot, lonely summer in the Orange Free State of South Africa, feisty Ruthie Blackburn finds herself at odds with everyone around her. She squirms under the watchful eye of her nanny, Miriam, and bristles at the neighbour’s gardener’s boy, Sip, who follows her everywhere and is her only friend. But mostly she misses her distracted widower father who is more absent each day.

Ruthie runs reckless through the bleary, dull days of summer until the monotony is interrupted by the arrival of two guests from the big city. The events of this one weekend will alter the course of Ruthie’s adolescence and lead to a devastating tragedy. Set against the shifting political tensions of the late 1970s and written in prose that is both poetic and evocative, Ruthie and Sip powerfully captures a young girl’s sudden end of innocence.

About the author

MEIRA COOK’s first novel, The House on Sugarbush Road, won the 2013 McNally Robinson Manitoba Book of the Year Award and was a nominee for the Winnipeg Public Library’s On The Same Page competition. Her poetry won first place in the CBC Literary Awards in 2007, garnered a Manitoba Publishing Award (a “Maggie”), and has been featured in Winnipeg Transit’s “Poetry in Motion” program. Two of her poems were on the longlist for the 2013 CBC Writes contest. She won the inaugural Walrus Poetry Prize in 2012, and one of her poems was on the shortlist for the 2013 Walrus Poetry Prize. Meira was also the 2013 writer-in-residence for the Winnipeg Public Library.