The Year the Gypsies Came

From the outside, Emily's family lives the perfect, privileged white suburban lifestyle of late 1960s Johannesburg. They are guarded from the darkness of the woods and the apartheid-riven society beyond by Buza, their faithful Zulu night-watchman, but inside the family is fragmenting.

Then one summer their very own gypsies come to stay – a family of rootless wanderers who camp in the garden. Soon dangerous undercurrents of adultery, race and burgeoning sexuality inexorably surface. By the autumn, the family is changed forever.

Glass hauntingly captures the desperate intensity of Emily's loss of innocence, interweaving vividly realised strands of place, history and legend in this assured, beautifully constructed and moving debut novel. A book which will stay with you long after you have finished reading.