The Rowing Lesson

Anne Landsman

Nov 2007 · Soho Press

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Betsy Klein is summoned from her home in the United States to the bedside of her dying father in a South African hospital. Faced with having to say goodbye, she delves into his mind, speaking to him in the lyrical second-person. She imaginatively recreates his life—his struggles to become a doctor after being orphaned young and his fight to win the respect of his Boer patients as a Jew—as well as her own experiences with him as a father.

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Anne Landsman is the author of the novels The Rowing Lesson and The Devil’s Chimney. The Rowing Lesson was awarded South Africa’s two top literary awards—the 2009 Sunday Times Fiction Prize and South Africa’s 2009 M-Net Literary Award for English fiction—and was shortlisted for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and the Harold U. Ribalow Prize. Award nominations for The Devil’s Chimney include the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. She has contributed essays to the anthologies Touch, An Uncertain Inheritance and The Honeymoon’s Over and has written for numerous publications including Vanity Fair, The Washington Post, The American Poetry Review, The Believer, The Guardian and The Telegraph. Born in South Africa, she lives in New York City with her husband and two children.