THE DREAM HOUSE

Written with dark wit, a stark poetic style and extraordinary compassion, The Dream House is an allegorical tale that is subtly brilliant. But it is also so much more than a novel about South Africa; it is a novel about truth, about memory, how we use it or don't, about honesty and about love.

The Dream House is the story of Patricia, her husband Richard, their two servants Beauty and Bheki, and Looksmart, a young man whom Patricia took under her wing when he was growing up on their farm in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands, who returns unexpectedly after 20 years away. At the heart of the novel is dialogue: between different characters' accounts of events, themselves and each other; and an ongoing dialogue between what is thought or felt and what is heard or stated. Higginson uses the two generations and their dialogue, their heart-wrenching story, to simply and delicately illustrate the state of a nation. CRAIG HIGGINSON is an internationally acclaimed writer and theatre director who is currently a writer and script editor for a production company called The Bomb Shelter. In February 2010, Craig's novel Last Summer was released to critical and popular acclaim, and the Landscape Painter, first released in 2011, was the winner of the 2011 University of Johannesburg Prize for South African Writing in English and was shortlisted for the 2012 English M-Net Literary Award.