Michelle Pretorius

"At once a shocking, unputdownable thriller and a brilliantly imagined journey through South Africa's troubled history, The Monster's Daughter is one of the most original and exciting debuts since Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife. December 2010. A disgraced young constable named Alet Berg is reassigned to the sleepy provincial town of Unie, where she makes a terrifying discovery: the body of a young woman, burned beyond recognition. The crime soon leads Alet into her country's violent past--a past that includes her father, a high-ranking police official who may have played a sinister role during the long, brutal apartheid regime. A hundred years earlier, at the height of the Boer War, a doctor conducts a series of vicious experiments near a British concentration camp, where he intends to breed a new master race. His work ends in chaos, but two children survive: a boy named Benjamin, and a girl named Tessa. And they are not like other children. The horrors of South Africa's history and the tensions of its present converge in Michelle Pretorius's epic debut, which weaves present and past into a hugely suspenseful, masterfully plotted thriller with echoes of the fantastical. A novel that calls to mind Lauren Beukes's The Shining Girls and Tana French's The Secret Place, The Monster's Daughter will surprise and satisfy you all the way up to its explosive conclusion"--