Barnes & Noble Digital Library

The Story of an African Farm is an exhilarating tale utterly unlike anything British readers had previously encountered from South Africa. It offers a picture of colonial life that is both comic and tragic, prosaic and haunting. The story follows the lives of three children that lived on a farm in the Cape Colony when Southern Africa was on the verge of capitalization and industrialization, following the discovery of diamonds that year. The Story of an African Farm is widely regarded as a central text in the development of South African literature in English.