A Long Letter to My Daughter

A long letter to my daughter is the youth memoir of Marita van der Vyver, one of the most loved Afrikaans authors. It is the heart-warming letter from an Afrikaans mom to her French-speaking daughter about growing up in apartheid South Africa in the 1960’s and 1970’s. But it is also a story about language and books and the wonder of words. And how a shy bookworm from a first-generation middle-class family became a well-known writer. It is a book which is hard to put down as it traces Van der Vyver’s early years during apartheid, but at the same time it is love letter to a daughter and a language and a country. With a mother who desperately tries to make sense of it all.