Bitter Aloes: Stories from the Eastern Cape

You would think not much ever happens in the sleepy towns and dusty pineapple valleys of South Mrica’s eastern cape, yet look deeper. On shade-dappled farmhouse porches and in the back rooms of rented settler-era cottages in Fort Beaufort, stories unfold every day. Stories of loss, love, betrayal, obsession … and fish. In the last decades of the 2oth century, author Marion Baxter cut a solitary and eccentric figure in provincial society, whose introspection belied a pen that wouldn’t stop writing about the people and places around her. An author is, above all, an observer - and Baxter’s writings stand as a high definition showcase of the place and time where she lived out her latter years. Baxter passed away from advanced breast cancer in july 2002, leaving behind a stack of neatly filed manuscripts in her small Rhodes University office. This volume of stories was on the top.