Michiel Heyns

The children's day

“Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to.” This is the maxim of celebrated author Henry James and one which his typist Frieda Wroth tries to live up to. Admiring of the great author, she nevertheless feels marginalized and undervalued in her role. But when the dashing Morton Fullerton comes to visit, Frieda finds herself at the center of an intrigue every bit as engrossing as the novels she types, bringing her into conflict with the flamboyant Edith Wharton, and compromising her loyalty to James. The Typewriter’s Tale by Michiel Heyns is a thought-provoking novel on love, art and life fully lived.

The Typewriter's Tale

Abby Fabiaschi

Jessica Strawser

Kathleen Rooney

S. Jae-Jones

Dane Huckelbridge

Jay Baron Nicorvo

William Christie

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Winter 2017 St. Martin's First Sampler

Este libro está inspirado en el personaje de Theodora Bosanquet —Frieda en la novela—, quien, entre 1907 y 1916, fue la mecanógrafa del famoso novelista Henry James. Al mismo tiempo que profesa una gran admiración por el escritor, Frieda se siente marginada y subestimada. Sin embargo, la llegada a Lamb House de Morton Fullerton, un seductor periodista amigo de James, pone a Frieda en el punto de mira. A medida que va ganándose la confianza del señor Fullerton, Frieda se verá inmersa en una intriga tan apasionante como las novelas que mecanografía. Todos los personajes que aparecen en esta novela son reales. Éste es el caso también de los escritores Horace Walpole y Edith Wharton, amigos de James, o de Alice y William James, hermanos del escritor. Con un lenguaje cuidado y exquisito, Michiel Heyns realiza un retrato extraordinario no sólo de las personas más allegadas a James, sino también de las actitudes y costumbres de principios del siglo xx.

La mecanógrafa de Henry James

Award-winning Michiel Heyns returns with a richly textured novel set in contemporary South Africa. The murder of a beautiful woman shatters the rural village peace of Alfredville, and her husband, the police station commander, is jailed as chief suspect. Her cousin Peter, a freelance writer in London, returns to South Africa for the first time in decades -- unsettled, curious, but also in search of a career-defining story. On checking into the Queen's Hotel he finds that things are not as straightforward as he imagined, and South Africa is not as he left it. His carefully ordered world is thrown into turmoil as his trip dredges up a long-abandoned past, forcing him to question the assumptions so easily held from the comfort of his London flat. He meets a mixture of locals, visitors, vagrants and migrants, but most momentously, Peter discovers that his bosom friend from school, Bennie Nienaber, is still in Alfredville -- and is in fact now, acting station commander at the local police station. Peter re-establishes an awkward friendship with his erstwhile friend and the two warily circle each other, sharing reminiscences that hint at a bond much deeper than nostalgia. As Peter abandons the neatly patterned story he had planned and is forced to participate in a community that he once despised, he begins to reconsider his place in the world. In search of Desirée's story, he now starts to rewrite his own -- till events take an even more shocking turn. . . This book explores questions of xenophobia and prejudice, of national, sexual and personal identity, and what it means to be a foreigner wherever you go.

A Novel

Lost Ground

Against the background of massive public events -- the tenacious, at times violent struggle for the vote for women and the First World War -- "Bodies Politic" examines, in fictionalised form, the private lives of the participants in these events, focused through the highly articulate accounts of three suffragettes. Moving, dramatic and at times grimly humorous, "Bodies Politic" is an entirely original account of great love and bitter resentment, political victory and personal defeat; but ultimately of the indomitable spirit that escapes the shackles of the body. The three women who look back on a past they shared, not always harmoniously, are Emmeline Pankhurst, the formidable leader of the Women's Movement; her daughter Sylvia, 'the weeping suffragette'; and the enchanting Helen, who was loved by Harry, the neglected son of Emmeline and beloved brother of Sylvia. Through the narrative of each woman flits the figure of Christabel, Mrs Pankhurst's favourite daughter: selfish, vain but irresistible. The three accounts, sometimes contradictory, sometimes confirmatory, movingly reconstruct Harry's last days and the human entanglements behind the public acts of the time: Sylvia's sacrifice in bringing Helen to Harry's bedside, Emmeline's bitterness at Sylvia's act, and Helen's ambivalence about Sylvia's extraordinary request: 'Tell him you love him; he has only three weeks to live.'

Bodies Politic

Professor and Chair of the Department of English Michiel Heyns

This lively and original book places the realist novel in the centre of current debates by examining the notion that such novels reinforced existing social structures. Includes close readings of authors such as Austen, Dickens, Eliot, Conrad, and James.

The Scapegoat in English Realist Fiction

Expulsion and the Nineteenth-century Novel

Lost Ground is a richly textured novel set in contemporary South Africa. The murder of a beautiful woman shatters the rural village peace of Alfredville, and her husband, the police station commander, is jailed as chief suspect. Her cousin Peter, a freelance writer in London, returns to South Africa for the first time in decades - unsettled, curious, but also in search of a career-defining story.As Peter abandons the neatly patterned story he had planned and is forced to participate in a community that he once despised, he begins to reconsider his place in the world. In search of Desirée's story, he now starts to rewrite his own - till events take an even more shocking turn... Lost Ground explores questions of xenophobia and prejudice, of national, sexual and personal identity, and what it means to be a foreigner wherever you go. In Invisible Furies Christopher Turner returns to Paris after a thirty-year absence. He is here to extricate his best friend's son Eric from the mercenary machinations of some Parisian gold-digger - or so it is assumed, at home in South Africa. Christopher, with melancholy memories of Paris, is deeply ambivalent about the city; and, as for the young Eric, Christopher remembers him as a brutish lout with little to recommend himself.As Christopher comes to know and enjoy this ambiguous world, he finds his moral categories challenged: is beauty a trap for the innocent young, or a self-validating, even ennobling attribute of a fully lived life? Responding to the gentle appeal of Beatrice, he feels ever more strongly that the young man's place is in Paris with her, rather than on his father's farm in Franschhoek. But Eric has ideas of his own . . . Exploring, as in the widely applauded Lost Ground, the tensions between the fatherland and a larger world, Michiel Heyns turns an ironic eye on the most seductive city on earth, and traces with humour and insight the invisible furies of the heart. In A Sportful Malice a young South African literary scholar, Michael Marcussi, is offered, via a Facebook contact, a house in the Tuscan village of Gianocini, and he accepts with alacrity: this is just the space and quiet he needs to complete his study of Literary Representations of Tuscany. But even before he has boarded his plane at Stansted Airport, things start vexing him: an obnoxious old man jumps the boarding queue, and Michael is given the evil eye by a belligerent bovver boy covered in tattoos. Nor is this to be his last meeting with these objectionable characters: they turn up in unexpected places, first in Florence and then in Gianocini itself, with a frequency that cannot be purely coincidental. In the meantime Michael is pursuing his own extracurricular agenda, through the streets of Florence and the passages of the Uffizi, then through the medieval alleys of Gianocini, only to find himself the object of mysterious designs and the subject of some very disturbing paintings. Add to this the innocent but curious Wouter, the startlingly rude upper-class harridan, Sophronia, the beautiful but supercilious Paolo and a dog called Thanatos: the Tuscan sun never shone on a more bizarre mix. A Sportful Malice is a scintillating tale of love, revenge and trippa.

Michiel Heyns: Three Novels in One

Chris Barnard

After a severe drought causes hundreds of refugees from across the border to pour into Mozambique, a small clinic, with no outside help, comes up with an illegal plan to get necessary supplies, as they deal with the desperation surrounding them.

Michiel Heyns

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