A Sin of Omission

Winner of The Sunday Times CNA Literary Awards. Shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize Torn from his parents and tribe as a boy in the 1870s, Stephen Mzamane is picked by the Anglican church to train at the Missionary College in Canterbury to be a rural preacher in Southern Africa’s Cape Colony. He is a brilliant success but troubles stalk him: his unresolved relationship with his family and people, the condescension of church leaders towards their own native pastors, and That Woman—seen once in a photograph and never forgotten. And now he has to find his mother and take her a message that will break her heart. In this raw and compelling story, Marguerite Poland employs her considerable experience as a writer and specialist in South African languages to recreate the polarised, duplicitous world of Victorian colonialism and its betrayal of the very people it claimed to be enlightening.

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