Summary:

Doebin is an island reserve for Aborigines off the coast of north Queensland. In 1930 the superintendent goes insane after his wife dies. He sets fire to his house, kills his children, and wounds others in a bloody rampage that ends in his being shot by an Aboriginal man. Interestingly, this superintendent was a benevolent dictator who actually appeared to care for the Aborigines, whom he considered childlike and treated in a strict paternalistic manner. In return, his charges respected him and called him "Uncle Boss."

The book tells this story from the perspectives of several different characters and reveals how the events of 1930 influenced their lives and bound them together in mysterious ways. We learn of the influence these events had on the subsequent lives of the island's little community: doctor, matron, schoolteacher, boarding house operator, priest, and Manny Cooktown, the man who shot and killed the madman, Captain Brodie.

Time moves on, things change. World War II comes and goes. On Doebin Island, however, Aboriginal people continue to be treated like prisoners. Benign paternalism is replaced by out-and-out hatred during the reigns of a succession of superintendents, who treat their Aboriginal charges as if they were animals.

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Summary:

Jimmie Blacksmith is the son of a white man and an Aboriginal woman in late 19th century New South Wales. A Methodist minister teaches him Christian ideals and Western ambition. Thus, he sets out to make a life for himself in the cash economy and to marry a white woman, who he believes is carrying his child.

For a long time Jimmie quietly overcomes one barrier after another, and calmly accepts the continuous taunting and humiliation of Christian whites, who believe that Aboriginal people are dirt. However, he finally snaps. Exploited by his boss and betrayed by his wife, he simply cannot take it anymore. Jimmie then goes on a killing spree that seems to confirm the whites' worst fears.

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Summary:

The novel begins in Hobart, Tasmania, in the 1950's. Richard Miller, a student at the Christian Brothers' school, spends his adolescence recovering from the effects of polio. His one friend is Brian Brady, who is expelled from the school after a tiff with a sadistic Brother. Brian finds work and studies the guitar with Clive Broderick, the "doubleman" of the novel's title, an enigmatic occultist who believes in separate worlds of good (invisible) and evil (visible) reality.

Years later, in the freewheeling '60's, Richard has become a television producer in Sydney. He once again encounters Brian and his friend Darcy Burr, who have been eking out a living as a folk singing duo. Darcy, who has inherited Broderick's Gnosticism, is convinced that his group, the Rymers (which soon grows to include Richard's wife Katrin as lead singer), will achieve fame and fortune.

Richard produces a series of television shows, which, in fact, turn the Rymers into a very hot commodity. They are on the verge of a triumphant tour to England when the threads of their complex story begin to unravel.

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In the mid-19th Century, a teenage prophetess named Nongqawuse preached salvation for the Xhosa people. If the people would slaughter all of their cattle and burn all of their crops, the spirits of their ancestors would rise and drive their oppressors (the English colonizers) into the sea. The ancestors would also resurrect the cattle and restore the crops. A large percentage of the Xhosa ("Believers") adopted this new religion, destroyed their livelihood, and initiated many years of disease and starvation. The Xhosa nation might well have been wiped out, but for the fact that some of the people ("Unbelievers") rejected these prophecies and did not destroy their crops and cattle.

These historical events serve as the cornerstone of The Heart of Redness, which presents two intertwined fictional narratives: one that occurs in the time of Nongqawuse and a second narrative that takes place in Qolorha, a Xhosa village in present-day South Africa. In the novel the conflict between Believers and Unbelievers has persisted through the "Middle Generations" and continues to the present. Believers claim that the prophecies of Nongqawuse would have come true, if only all of the Xhosa people had destroyed their farms and cattle. The ancestors failed to return because of the unbelief of a portion of the people.

Unbelievers argue that the folly of the original Believers led to decades of suffering and a strengthening of the English colonizers. This traditional conflict is reflected today in their attitudes toward economic development. Developers want to build a large casino and resort complex near the village. Unbelievers support the proposal because it will bring jobs and money to the region. Believers are dead set against the proposal because it will destroy their way of life.

Meanwhile, Camagu, who has a Ph.D. in economic development and who returned from exile in 1994 to help build the new South Africa, has moldered for years in Johannesburg, unable to find a job appropriate to his skills. When he meets a young woman who says she is returning home to Qolorha, he spontaneously follows her there. Camagu decides to remain in the village and, against his will, becomes embroiled in the battle between Believers and Unbelievers, as well as love affairs with two women, one from each side of the conflict.

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Summary:

The time is November 1899 through February 1900; the place is Ladysmith, a small railroad town in British Natal near its border with the Boer Republics. The Boers have surprised the world with an initial series of Samson-and-Goliath victories over the British army and have now laid siege to Ladysmith. As they shell the town from surrounding hills, people die, disease is rampant, structures collapse, starvation looms, and yet the British muddle through with an improvised cricket match whenever possible.

The setting of this novel is historically accurate, and a number of historical figures appear as characters; for example, the Boers arrest a young reporter named Winston Churchill as he struggles to reach the besieged town, and an Indian lawyer-turned-medical volunteer named Mohandas K. Gandhi becomes more and more committed to his philosophy of active nonviolence.

The core of the novel is a fictionalized version of a love story that the author found in the letters of his great-grandfather, who was a British soldier at Ladysmith. Bella, the Irish hotelkeeper’s daughter, falls in love, first, with a British soldier; and later with a Portuguese barber, thus defying convention and rebelling against her father. The unlikely couple escapes in a balloon.

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Sapphira was a fashionable young woman in Winchester when she married Henry Colbert, a man beneath her station, and moved to a rugged backwoods village, where they have lived for more than 30 years. Twenty of Sapphira's slaves came with them. This caused somewhat of a sensation among the poor, non-slave owning population of the region, where even to this day the Colberts are admired but not well-liked. Henry successfully took over the village grinding mill, while Sapphira assumed the role of local granddame. They had three daughters, all of whom married and moved away. However, Rachel's husband died, and she returned to Back Creek with her two young children.

Sapphira and Rachel are lay nurses who often visit and comfort the sick. Sapphira appears to do this work out of a sense of noblesse oblige, but Rachel feels empathy for the sick and less fortunate. She sets herself above nobody. Rachel is also an abolitionist at heart (as, to some extent, is her father), but Sapphira is firmly convinced that slavery is not only necessary, but also moral. Henry, a rather ineffectual male presence in this story, has responded to Sapphira's haughty regime by gradually withdrawing. In fact, he has largely abandoned the Big House to live at the mill, which he justifies by claiming the lack of a reliable foreman.

Sapphira suffers from severe dropsy. Her swelling is so bad she can no longer walk. She is jealous of a young slave named Nancy, with whom she believes Henry is having an affair. Much of the novel describes Sapphira's attempts to get rid of Nancy, first by selling the girl in Winchester, and later (when Henry refuses to sell) by importing her ne'r-do-well nephew to rape and destroy Nancy. This doesn't work either, primarily because Rachel takes Nancy under her wing and arranges her escape to Canada via the Underground Railroad.

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Summary:

An American-trained Japanese surgeon working in Japan during World War II, pulls a wounded American sailor, presumably an escaped POW, from the surf behind his home. Against the advice of his wife, he hides the sailor, operates on him, and preserves his life temporarily.

Becoming fearful for his family, he reports what he has done to his patient, an official in the Japanese military. The officer says he will arrange to have the American assassinated in order to spare possible retribution against Sadao, the surgeon, and his family. It doesn’t happen, and Sadao is left with determining how to rid himself of this hazard he has brought into his home and healed. He makes a series of decisions that lend themselves to widely varying interpretations in terms of his motivation.

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From a fishing trip the local doctor is summoned to an Indian village to assist a woman in labor. With him are his young son and an older male relative. The physician assesses the situation in the closed, pungent hut and determines that his only option is section--with a pen knife and fishing leader as his instruments, and no anesthesia for the Indian woman. The doctor arrogantly, but only briefly, celebrates his success as a surgeon only to discover that the woman's husband, apparently unable to tolerate his wife's pain and the racism of the white visitors, has silently slit his own throat. The child, who has observed the entire proceedings asks, "Is dying hard, Daddy?"

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Summary:

Hurston's powerful, lyric second novel centers on Janie Crawford, an African-American woman who tells her life story to her friend, Phoeby. Janie, raised in rural west Florida by her grandmother, is forced to marry, at age sixteen, a landowner, Logan Killicks. Far from giving her stability and respectability, Killicks instead treats her like a mule. Her image of love and life as a beautiful blossoming pear tree that grew in her grandmother's yard is dashed by the harsh realities of this loveless marriage.

She leaves Killicks to marry Joe Starks, an ambitious businessman who builds and becomes the mayor of an all black town. Joe also treats her as property--as a showpiece to bolster his image in the town, and does not allow her to befriend any one else. When Joe dies after seventeen years, Janie is finally financially and spiritually independent.

She falls in love with a young roustabout, Tea Cake--a man who (mostly) treats her as an equal partner and who returns her love fully. Despite the townspeople's disapproval, Janie and Tea Cake leave the town to make their way in the Florida muck, working side by side as itinerant farm hands.

During a hurricane and flood, Tea Cake saves Janie from a mad dog, but gets bitten himself. Tea Cake later develops fulminant rabies and is too late to receive effective treatment. Tea Cake turns on Janie and she must defend herself. The novel closes back in the frame of telling the story to Phoeby, of teaching Phoeby about love: "Love is lak de sea. It's uh movin' thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets, and it's different with every shore." Janie, reflective, mature, and strong, has gained wisdom from her life and suffering.

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Summary:

In a rural town in Louisiana in the late 1940's a poorly educated young black man, Jefferson, is in the wrong place at the wrong time: he is in a liquor store with two friends when they murder the white storekeeper. Jefferson is unfairly convicted of murder and sentenced to the electric chair by a white judge and jury.

His defense lawyer, in trying to stave off the death sentence, labels him a "hog"--and it is this label that Jefferson's godmother wants disproved. She enlists the help of the narrator of the novel, Grant Wiggins, the plantation schoolteacher.

Wiggins agrees to talk with Jefferson only out of a sense of duty--he is an unhappy, angry man who dreamt of escape from his impoverished youth yet returned to his hometown after a university education to teach in the same one-room parish school he attended. Despite humiliation at the hands of the white sheriff, Jefferson's lack of cooperation, and his own sense of futility and uncertain faith, Wiggins forges a bond with Jefferson that leads to wisdom and courage.

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