“More than fifty years ago South Africa’s most important newspaper opined that
southern Africa was blessed in having three such wonderful young women writers
as Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer and Daphne Rooke. Of the three, it believed,
the best was clearly Rooke.” The TLS, July 2006
The Toby Press is delighted to be issuing new editions of Daphne Rooke’s remarkable and
timeless novels. We expect that a new generation of readers will appreciate and relish some
of the finest South African writing of the last century.
Set in the cane fields of Natal, Ratoons is a portrait of a
beautiful but barbaric land. The narrator Helen Angus, like
her Indian friends Leela and later Amoya, is caught up in a
world of contrasts where violence and hatred vie with love,
passion and the always exotic loveliness of the landscape.
About the Author
 DAPHNE ROOKE (born 1914), was born in Boksburg, Transvaal, of an English father
and Afrikaans mother, and grew up in Durban. She later moved to Zululand, where A
Grove of Fever Trees, her first novel, was set. During, the 1930s she worked as a journalist
in South Africa. She married an Australian and moved there with him. Mittee was
published in 1951 and became an international bestseller. It was followed in subsequent
years by a series of striking novels on turbulent South African themes. Rooke ultimately
moved to England, and lives in Cambridge.
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The Critics Praise:
“…Ratoons is too good, too much a novel of Natal, of the
languid heat of Durban, of the rickshaws plying their trade
and, above all, of the endless interplay between the three
races, to be anything but a classic. Its time will come again.”
- From the afterword by RW Johnson
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