The Monster's Daughter

At once a shocking, unputdownable thriller and a brilliantly imagined journey through South Africa's troubled history, The Monster's Daughter is one of the most original and exciting debuts since Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife. December 2010. A disgraced young constable named Alet Berg is reassigned to the sleepy provincial town of Unie, where she makes a terrifying discovery: the body of a young woman, burned beyond recognition. The crime soon leads Alet into her country's violent past—a past that includes her father, a high-ranking police official who may have played a sinister role during the long, brutal apartheid regime. A hundred years earlier, at the height of the Boer War, a doctor conducts a series of vicious experiments near a British concentration camp, where he intends to breed a new master race. His work ends in chaos, but two children survive: a boy named Benjamin, and a girl named Tessa. And they are not like other...