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The Paradise People by David Lytton
"... I give you the valley at the end of the red road that made its first discoverer sufficiently poetical to call it Paradise....
"The valley is in the northwest Cape Province. The homestead and the church of the mission stand at the northern end of the valley, on the highest ground. My grandmother stands at the center of the mission and therefore at the center of the life of the valley.
"In the beginning for me was my grandmother, as vast and lawful as creation, looming in the first light of memory.
"My mother had died in the bush when I was two weeks old. My father had brought me to his home in a sheepskin cradle slung from his horse. There he had left me and returned to his private quarrel with the blank spaces in the map of Africa. My grandmother had reared me along with the various other forms of life she was perpetually coaxing into growth: pig, of which she was fond, especially at Christmas basted with butter; foals, turkeys and two young ostriches which became a nuisance later.
"She was an enormous woman, smelling of lemons. She softened her large hands with them and would rub the juice of them into her face last thing at night..."
In this poetic vein, the life and legend of the Boers at the turn of the century is here re-created, in a sensitive novel about a boy growing up in frontier country. The author calls them simple, earth-stained people of the an era that has passed away; he has made them meaningful and memorable in any age.
(From inside cover jacket of book.)
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