Book and Stories

Launched 9 November 2022

Catastrophe

Fiction

Exiled ballerina Lena Sergeyevna lies in hospital in New York, dying of cancer. Desperate to reconcile with her estranged daughter, she begins to reveal the truth about her flight from the 1986 Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant disaster where her husband Yuri, a nuclear physicist, disappeared while performing top-secret research. We discover that Lena’s former life involved deep compromises for which she has paid a heavy price in shame and self-loathing. What happened to Yuri, was he somehow involved in the ‘accident’, and what made Lena leave the USSR and take up exotic dancing in the US? Set in a geopolitical hotspot, Ukraine, this intelligent memoir–thriller explores the struggle for self-expression, the triumph of truth over deception, and the impact on the human psyche of personal and global catastrophe.

Subversion

(previously Featherstream)

Fiction

February 1942. With the Nazis triumphant in Europe, North Africa and much of the USSR, control of the shipping lanes off the southernmost tip of Africa is an Allied imperative. At the urging of Prime Minister Jan Smuts, South Africa’s parliament has narrowly voted to join the British war effort, but the country remains bitterly divided. Feisty university student Anna van der Vliet returns to her family farm near Cape Agulhas during the holidays. Noticing strange comings and goings in the area, she begins to suspect that her father, a prominent Member of Parliament, may be involved in a clandestine operation to aid the enemy.

Written as a thesis for UCT MA in Creative Writing under the supervision of Professor Etienne van Heerden 

https://etiennevanheerden.co.za/publication-of-manuscript-supervised-by-etienne-van-heerden-featherstream-by-ian-sutherland/