Mirage

· Penguin Random House South Africa
4.0
1 review
Ebook
232
Pages
Eligible

About this ebook

A century-old trunk has been dug up near the railway village of Sterfontein. Inside is the lost journal of Victorian author Elizabeth Tenant – and what appear to be the remains of a child.

Michael, a university student recovering from a broken heart, is intrigued by what the journal describes: a scarlet curtain billowing above the desert, covering the entrance to another world. But things become even stranger when a line in the journal seems to be connected to Michael and his cosmologist mother, written a hundred years before their time.

Without much to go on, Michael travels to the old Karoo hotel where Elizabeth wrote her novel Mirage. Amid talk of omens in the sky, ancient prophecies and the end of the world, he tries to decipher the journal’s secrets. As one mystery leads to the next, constellation-like patterns between his own life and Elizabeth’s appear, helped along by Renata, a self-proclaimed medium, and Oom Sarel, the local museum curator. But as time starts to dissolve in the mirages of the Karoo, it becomes more and more difficult to know what is real and what is not.

And why can’t he shake the feeling that he’s been to the village before?

Ratings and reviews

4.0
1 review
Katinka Steyn
April 6, 2023
Mirage was a sensitive, poignant journey through the memories the main character, Michael, had to process. The beautiful descriptions of the Karoo landscape in Southern Africa really drew me in, and the eventual unraveling of relations was quite interesting. An interesting and well researched read!
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About the author

David Ralph Viviers is a Cape Town-based writer and film and theatre actor. He holds a BA in Theatre and Performance, as well as a master’s degree in Creative Writing, both with distinction, from the University of Cape Town. In 2016, he was the recipient of the Brett Goldin Bursary award, which allowed him to study with the Royal Shakespeare Company for a month in Stratford-upon-Avon. For his work in both English and Afrikaans theatre, he won a Fleur du Cap Award in 2020 and has received several Kanna and Fiësta nominations. His film/TV work includes Binnelanders, Tali’s Baby Diary, Kanarie, No Hiding Here, Home Affairs 1 & 2, Rage and Black Sails.

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