Nadia Davids Cape Fever review and information of the content of the gothic crime novel by the South African author. Simon & Schuster will publish the Nadia Davids gothic novel and final on December 9, 2025. Here you can read information about the content of the book, the author and the publication.

Nadia Davids Cape Fever reviews

• “If you ever wondered if a Gothic thriller had room for racial microaggressions and critiques of empire, this is the book for you.” (The New York Book Review)
• “The Cape Town that Nadia Davids summons up in her invaluable body of work is a riven, achingly sad place of shadows, quite unlike the comfortable, sleepy Mother City of the colonial imagination.” (J.M. Coetzee)
• “Davids’ work is a song, a hundred years in the past or a hundred years in the future, that will continue to vibrate. Timeless, enriching, and just beautiful, Cape Fever now has a place on my bookshelf among the greats.” (Cebo Campbell)

Cape Fever

• Author: Nadia Davids (South Africa)
• Book type: crime novel, gothic novel
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• To be released: December 9, 2025
• Length: 240 pages
• Format: hardback / paperback / ebook / audiobook
• Prize: $ 27.00 / $ 12.99 / $ 19.99
• Order book from: Amazon / Bol

Blurb of the Nadia Davids gothic crime novel

From award-winning South African author Nadia Davids comes a gothic psychological thriller set in the 1920s, where a young maid finds herself entangled with the spirits of a decaying manor and the secrets of its enigmatic owner.

I come highly recommended to Mrs. Hattingh through sentences I tell her I cannot read.

The year is 1920, in a small, unnamed city in a colonial empire. Soraya Matas believes she has found the ideal job as a personal maid to the eccentric Mrs. Hattingh, whose beautiful, decaying home is not far from The Muslim Quarter where Soraya lives with her parents. As Soraya settles into her new role, she discovers that the house is alive with spirits.

While Mrs. Hattingh eagerly awaits her son’s visit from London, she offers to help Soraya stay in touch with her fiancé Nour by writing him letters on her behalf. So begins a strange weekly meeting where Soraya dictates and Mrs. Hattingh writes—a ritual that binds the two women to one another and eventually threatens the sanity of both.

Cape Fever is a masterful blend of gothic themes, folk-tales, and psychological suspense, reminiscent of works by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Daphne du Maurier, and Soraya Matas is an unforgettable narrator, whose story of love and grief, is also a chilling exploration of class and the long reach of history.

Nadia Davids was born in 1977 in Cape Town, South Africa. She is an acclaimed South African playwright, novelist, academic, and former President of PEN South Africa. Her debut novel An Imperfect Blessing was shortlisted for the Etisalat Prize for Literature. Her plays At Her Feet and What Remains have been staged internationally. She has been a visiting scholar/artist at the University of California, Berkeley, and at New York University, the recipient of a Philip Leverhulme Prize, and has taught theater at Queen Mary University of London and literature at the University of Cape Town. Her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The American Scholar, Astra Magazine, The Georgia Review, and Zyzzyva Magazine. She won the 2024 Caine Prize for her short story, “Bridling.” She lives in California and was a writer in residence at Aspen Writes.

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