An Icelandic volcano has thrown an ash cloud into the atmosphere and, across the world, planes have stopped flying. Overhead, the skies are severely blue. Leah Nash and Niall Lawrence, twenty-somethings in love, grow strangely restless. They set out on different but parallel pathways. He takes on work at an Antarctic polar station and experiences the strange and lonely beauty of the precarious ice-world. She studies writing in England and struggles to find her way. They are both determined to stay together though separated by thousands of miles.

Elleke Boehmer’s Ice Shock is a love-story set against the backdrop of the melting ice-caps. The novel asks what it is to be close even when we are far apart—distant yet proximate. How do we go on loving each other when the environment around us is changing catastrophically by the day?’

“Ice Shock is a propulsive and eerie love-story told frame by perilous frame. Threat lurks everywhere in the gaps, beneath surfaces that shift constantly like the melting ice floes of the characters’ real and imagined Antarctic worlds.”

—Jason Allen-Paisant

“Light, of all kinds and colours, and the volatile seasonal uncertainty of our world, shapes this warm-blooded love story—and interferes disturbingly with it. A terrific, atmospheric novel that is also a study in thinking and learning how to be a writer.”

—Kirsty Gunn

“Elleke Boehmer has given us a love story worth telling. The embrace of a man and a woman, separated by the distance between them—and yet so close. There is no beginning and no end, just the overpowering force of nature, the melting of the polar ice, swallowing life and the dreams of lovers.”

—Véronique Tadjo

“Leah and Niall meet by chance on the night bus from Edinburgh to London and fall in love. They agree to ‘give each other space’ and find themselves separated by a longitudinal parabola that stretches their commitment to breaking point … Elleke Boehmer’s lucid gaze forces the reader to imagine in a more-than-Antarctic light the lacunae of human communication, the relentless otherness of the physical world, and the sheer distance between global ‘north’ and ‘south’.”

—Terence Cave

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Shortlisted: 2019 Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize for ‘Supermarket Love’

Elleke Boehmer’s thrilling new collection of stories tracks lives across continents from the perspective of the southern hemisphere—its light, its seas, its sensibilities. Here people are caught up in a world that tilts seductively, sometimes dangerously, between south and north, between ambition and tradition. An African student in England longs for her desert home; a shy Argentinian travel agent agonizes about joining her boyfriend in New York; a soldier is pursued by his past.

Sharp, tender, and always arresting, these stories crackle with luminous insights as characters struggle to come to terms—with their pasts, with one another, and with themselves.

Arresting, intriguing, and brilliantly crafted, these stories explore the psychic wounds of our rapidly contracting contemporary world, with its complications of race, migration and trauma. Each unfolds with impeccable pacing, and gradually unveils a deeply humane sense of the world.

—Kwame Dawes

 

Compassionate, intelligent and evocative: this is a morally serious writing, lucidly rendered.

—Gail Jones

 

These assured, accomplished stories are reports from a world in which unacknowledged dark energies undermine and render hollow our bright, rational self-understanding. With passion and intelligence, and rare moral insight, Elleke Boehmer traces the scars left on the psyche by the tortuous histories of the South.

—J. M. Coetzee 

 

This collection isn’t just about geographical travel, it is very much concerned with our journey through life, how we interact with others and how those relationships change through our daily experiences and expectations. […] It is a collection about fine lines, and how they shift constantly throughout our lives. […] It delivers thoughts on how we create relationships and what we take away from them. Boehmer continually poses that age old question; Do we take and give in equal measure?

—Bookbound blog 

 

Boehmer’s book is a gift of discovery for us all, whether we come from the South or the North, a reminder of the transformative power of acceptance

—Gerri Kimber

 

[I]t’s a book that teachers you and a book that you’ll enjoy

—booksandcleverness_

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Published by

Co-winner: triennial Olive Schreiner Prize for Prose, 2018

Longlisted: Sunday Times Barry Ronge Fiction Prize, 2016

Late at night Ella watches her elderly father on the verandah, raging at the African sky. Caught between her mother’s mysterious grief and her father’s shattering wartime experiences, between the Holland of their past and apartheid South Africa, Ella fights hard to make it through her childhood in one piece. Her one enchantment is her forbidden love for the teenage gardener, Phineas. Years later, seeking political refuge in the Netherlands, Ella discovers her father never registered her birth. Now she must confront her father’s ghosts, and create a new future for herself.

The story, as disturbing as it is enthralling, of a girl’s struggle to emerge from under the dead weight of her father’s oppression while at the same time searching for a secure footing in the moral chaos of South Africa of the apartheid era. 

—J. M. Coetzee

A secret duel to the death between a father and a daughter.  Distilled with an intimate sense of history, and very moving,The Shouting in the Dark is a powerful novel of memory, family politics and awakening.

—Ben Okri

Boehmer’s The Shouting in the Dark … mirrors and mines the affective charge of a South African cultural and public life now avowedly post-TRC and shaped by new orders of private and public feeling, force and anger.

—Sarah Nuttall, Books Live

The Shouting in the Dark is a text that seems to be written through the mists of memory. Boehmer’s language is feathery – barely touching the surface of her stories, pregnant with things left unsaid.

—Zoe Norridge, Wasafiri 85 (Spring 2016)

Read more about the novel

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Published by Jacana (South Africa), 2010 and Historica (Italy), 2019

Police question a Cape Town female escort about the whereabouts of her client, the mysterious and impassioned Mr C. An elderly writer reflects on her experiences of the struggle and the complicated allegiances it has brought her. A father works together with his daughter to bring, as he thinks, Bach to Africa.

Sharmilla, and Other Portraits offers a dynamic series of insights into a South Africa in edgy transition. Its vivid and varied narratives follow a range of displaced children, mothers, and domestic workers, a stadium manager, an AIDS patient and an office secretary, as they look in on the new and changing situation. In Sharmilla, and Other Portraits Boehmer distils a compelling cycle of radiant snapshots detailing lived lives and their interwoven and secret undercurrents.

Elleke Boehmer brings to her stories two qualities that all too often are mutually exclusive: the lucidity of her intelligence and the passion of her engagement.

—André Brink

Perceptive, new stories.

—Caryl Phillips

The accurate simplicity is astonishing, especially because it is present in all her portraits.

—Tshepo Tshabalala, Star Tonight

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Nile Baby tells the story of two quirky young friends who discover a 90-year-old fetus in the laboratory storeroom of their school. Alice and Arnie set out on two very different journeys to return the specimen to its rightful home, leading them to discover not only their absent fathers, but also other buried and surprising roots. Reunited at the end of their adventures, they find that the fetus-creature will finally insist on its own manner of leaving them. This imaginative and daring novel explores the boundaries between the living and the dead and between the other and ourselves.

[A] strange and often unsettling odyssey across England … the novel asks us to consider the complex nature of race and belonging in contemporary Britain.

—Patrick Flanery, Times Literary Supplement

Boehmer’s eye for domestic detail and ear for the nuances of speech whisk the reader in and out of different ways of being . . . Arnie gradually realizes that life is shaped in unforeseen ways by history.

—Angela Smith, The Independent

Elleke Boehmer’s fourth novel is a remarkable change of gear: after the complex weaving of South African historical narratives in Bloodlines she has given us a focused, mesmerizing, and an occasionally stomach-turning story of two twelve-year-olds. … [The novel] grasps the enigmatic depths of human, and  continental, relations.

—Derek Attridge

[A] moving portrayal of friendship …

—Mariss Stevens, NELM News

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Published by David Philip (South Africa), 2000; Shenzhen Publishing House (China), 2024

Short-listed for the Sanlam Prize

This compelling historical novel about the birth of the new South Africa explores the moving friendship between two women thrown together by an act of terror, and asks searching questions about the power of testimony and reconciliation, and the price we pay for the pain of the past.

[A]n engrossing and intriguingly told chapter in anti-imperial history.

—J. M. Coetzee

[A] postcolonial fantasia … an imaginative exploration of the possibilities of connectedness. … The skilful tracing of bloodlines through several generations makes of a desperate act of violence a token of regeneration.

—Michiel Heyns, Sunday Independent

[A] journey into the possible … an extremely good read.

—Cape Argus

Bloodlines is an engaging and compelling book binding a potent theme and memorable characters into a brisk narrative … the writing shows a controlled resonance, the sign of a talent that must not be ignored.

—Times Literary Supplement

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Rosandra White is the proverbial perfect blonde. Exquisitely proportioned, desirable, her pale beauty exerts a powerful and dangerous allure. When she meets her childhood admirer Jem after years of risky liaisons, he finds that she has become a figure of unnerving intrigue.

[R]emarkable restraint and subtlety.

—West Africa

[A] very clever book indeed. … It adopts the aesthetic appropriate to a culture in a politically hopeless age.

—Jenny Turner, The Guardian

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Short-listed for the David Higham Prize

Set in South Africa in the late seventies, this novel describes the relationship between a white mother and her daughter, locked in a confined and self-absorbed world of domestic tension, until Annemarie starts work at a clinic for blacks.

A brilliant handling of an obsessional mother-daughter relationship … . Her descriptions are achingly acute.

—Financial Times

An astonishing debut … swift, deft … expertly told … With a mordant wit, she shows how discrimination can become as natural as breathing, and as unselfconscious.

—Penny Perrick, Sunday Times

Eloquently expressive.

—The Guardian

A beautifully authentic insight into a society turned in on itself in the face of black deprivation.

—Wendy Woods

Elegant, percipient writing.

—Zoe Heller, Observer

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