14/11/2024
We are thrilled to announce that Sunday Times Prize-winner Claire Robertson’s new novel, THE IMMORTALITES, will be published in SA by Penguin Random House SA
Editor Janita Low says: “Penguin Random House looks forward to publishing Claire Robertson’s THE IMMORTALITES. We have great faith in Claire’s writing and consider THE IMMORTALITES a welcome addition to our list.”
THE IMMORTALITES tells the story of Ellen Kent, who arrives on a ship, the Immortalite, in southernmost Africa in 1834. Molested on board, and shunned by her fellow passengers, she is placed in the care of Captain Fynmore Makepeace, who must bring her to a frontier town where she is to work at an orphanage. As they await their convoy, Makepeace wins a spectacular game of cards. The prize is a horse and van. And an operatic diva, Mrs Divine. As the party travels inland, Mrs Divine’s concerts prove lucrative for Makepeace. But the diva makes for a strange travel companion: bees drowse on her shoulders; fruit ripens in her lap; she collects human sounds of woe and pain, dispossession and longing. Might she be an incarnation of Aphrodite on African soil? Claire Robertson’s THE IMMORTALITES is an unforgettable novel written in virtuoso prose.
“I began to understand that you could read this place like a novel, if you didn’t mind half a morning between turns of the page,” says character Ellen Kent about the setting of the novel.
Publication is set for September 2025.
Claire Robertson is an award-winning journalist who has reported from South Africa, the US and the USSR. She has worked in newspapers, magazines, radio, and television. Her debut novel, THE SPIRAL HOUSE, won the Sunday Times Fiction Prize, as well as a South African Literary Award, and was shortlisted for the University of Johannesburg Debut Prize. She is the author of three more novels: THE MAGISTRATE OF GOWER, UNDER GLASS, both shortlisted for the Sunday Times Fiction Prize, and ISLE. She lives in Sydney.
The deal was negotiated by Fourie Botha of The Lennon-Ritchie Agency.
“Claire Robertson has lifted the bar of South African literature in one stroke. An unsettling, unforgettable work.” – Michele Magwood on THE SPIRAL HOUSE