{"product_id":"agaat-isbn-9780982503096","title":"Agaat","description":"\u003cb\u003e“I was immediately mesmerized . . . as brilliant as it is haunting.” —Toni Morrison\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn 1940s apartheid South Africa, Milla de Wet discovers a child abandoned in the fields of her family farm. Ignoring the warnings of friends and family, Milla brings the girl, Agaat, into her home. But the kindness is fleeting, as Milla makes Agaat her maidservant and, later, a nanny for her son. At turns cruel and tender, this relationship between a wealthy white woman and her Black maidservant is constantly fraught and shaped by a rigid social order.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDecades later, Milla is confined to her bed with ALS, and is quickly losing her ability to communicate. Her family has fallen apart, her country is on the brink of change, and all she has left are her memories—and a reckoning with the only person who remains by her side: Agaat. In complex and devastating ways, the power shifts between the two women, mirroring the historic upheavals happening around them and revealing a shared lifetime of hopes, sacrifices, and control.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHailed as an international masterpiece, Marlene van Niekerk’s \u003ci\u003eAgaat\u003c\/i\u003e is a haunting and deeply layered saga of resilience, loyalty, betrayal, and how the passage of time cannot heal all wounds.The most important South African novel since Coetzee’s \u003ci\u003eDisgrace\u003c\/i\u003e.\n—The Times Literary Supplement\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBooks like \u003ci\u003eAgaat\u003c\/i\u003e . . . are the reason people read novels, and the reason authors write them.\n—The New York Times Book Review\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis is a frank novel about a white South African landowner and her lifelong servant in a radically changing country.—O, The Oprah Magazine\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOne of the most extraordinary works that I have ever encountered. . . . van Niekerk exposes all of the nuances of the women’s fraught and volatile relationship with language that is brutally raw, honest, and uncommonly beautiful. Simply a masterpiece.—Words Without Borders\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA family saga of mothers and daughters . . . and a poetic exploration of control and the loss of control. It’s a stylishly inventive book.—The Rumpus\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA beautiful, complicated epic of agrarian life in South Africa from 1948 onward. . . . The book’s relevance to today’s racism and violence are coldly apparent.—BUST\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWonderful.—Good Housekeeping\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMomentous. . . . It is an allegory of colonial exploitation, apartheid, and the precarious steps towards reconciliation.—The Independent\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis novel stuns.—Booklist, Starred Review\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAn innovative epic.—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eAgaat\u003c\/i\u003e is a tangle of language and rhyme, of wordplay and digressions. . . . Both absorbing in its minutiae and provocative in its allegorical approach to apartheid, \u003ci\u003eAgaat\u003c\/i\u003e explodes the domestic sphere to encompass the world.\n—The Portland Mercury\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn addition to its vivid emotional resonance, \u003ci\u003eAgaat\u003c\/i\u003e is notable for the wealth of detail it imparts about rural life in South Africa before industrialized farming.\n—Hemispheres\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFascinating and moving, this is, above all, a love story.—The Times\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003evan Niekerk has created a work of stunning breadth and emotional potency.—Publishing Perspectives\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA masterpiece has arrived.—South African Sunday Times\u003cb\u003eMarlene Van Niekerk\u003c\/b\u003e is an award-winning poet, novelist and short story writer. She was awarded South Africa’s high honour, the Order of Ikhamanga, in 2011 for her outstanding intellectual contribution to the literary arts and culture field through poetry, literature and philosophical works. She has received many accolades, including being a finalist for the sixth Man Booker International Prize 2015 and shortlisted for the South African \u003ci\u003eSunday Times\u003c\/i\u003e Literary Prize, the M-Net Literary Prize, the Booksellers’ Choice Award South Africa and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eMichiel Heyns\u003c\/b\u003e is an award-winning literary translator and author of nine novels: \u003ci\u003eThe Children’s Day\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Reluctant Passenger\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Typewriter’s Tale\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eBodies Politic\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eInvisible Furies\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eLost Ground\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eA Sportful Malice\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eI am Pandarus\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eA Poor Season for Whales\u003c\/i\u003e. He was previously professor of English at the University of Stellenbosch.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eMary Gaitskill\u003c\/b\u003e is the author of several novels (most recently \u003ci\u003eThe Mare\u003c\/i\u003e) and story collections (most recently \u003ci\u003eDon’t Cry\u003c\/i\u003e), as well as a collection of essays and criticism titled \u003ci\u003eSomebody with a Little Hammer\u003c\/i\u003e and the novella \u003ci\u003eThis Is Pleasure\u003c\/i\u003e. She is currently a Podlich Fellow at Claremont McKenna College.","brand":"Tin House","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48232910291173,"sku":"NP9780982503096","price":19.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780982503096.jpg?v=1767721116","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/agaat-isbn-9780982503096","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}