Karen Jennings Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Collections

Karen Jennings is a published South African author.

She was born in Cape Town in South Africa in 1982. Her mother is Afrikaans and her father is English. Both of her parents happened to be teachers. Karen herself attended the University of Cape Town, where she graduated with master’s degrees in English literature and creative writing. She also graduated from the University of KwaZulu-Natal with a PhD in English literature.

Karen has also worked on doctoral work at the University of Johannesburg in history. She has also worked in Brazil doing post-doctoral research for the Federal University of Goirás.

Karen’s husband is Brazilian and they live together in Brazil.

The author’s first novel to come out was titled Finding Soutbek. It made the shortlist for the Etisalat Prize for African Fiction. Away from the Dead is her short story collection and she has released a poetry collection titled Space Inhabited by Echoes. She has also released Travels with my Father, a memoir. Her historical mining novel was released in 2019, titled Upturned Earth. She was able to write her novel An Island with help from the Miles Morland Foundation. It made the longlist for the Booker Prize in 2021.

Karen has also served as the editor for Feast, Famine, & Potluck, which was released in 2014 and is a collection of African short stories that was released for Short Story Day Africa.

Jennings has won the English section of the Maskew Miller Longman Literature Awards in 2009 for “Mia and the Shark”. Her short story “From Dark” was the winner of the Africa Region Prize of the Commonwealth Short Story Competition in 2010. An Island was also a co-winner of the K. Sello Duiker Memorial Award in 2021.

An Island is a 2020 novel from Karen Jennings. It made the longlist for the Booker Prize and has been called ‘powerful’ by The Guardian. If you are looking for a new fictional story to enjoy, check out this book that’s all about a lighthouse keeper that has a strange past and a stranger that comes up on the shore with the waves.

Samuel is the main character in this story. He’s been living alone off the coast on a small island close to a country in Africa for a long time. It’s been well over two decades at this point. Samuel doesn’t mind living this way, as he has plenty to do.

He takes care of his garden, he looks after the lighthouse, and he makes sure that his chickens are happy and fed. He’s happy to live this life on his own without anything or anyone bothering him. There’s refugees that wash up on the shore every so often, but that’s to be expected. The lighthouse keeper knows that the government is not going to do anything about it and so takes to burying them himself without any complaint.

He is taking care of one of these bodies as usual one day when he discovers that one of them is actually still breathing. They have not perished in the sea but are still somehow alive. He brings the stranger back to life slowly by taking care of him but Samuel also starts to experience memories coming back from his old life on the mainland serving as a political prisoner.

In this hard former life, Samuel saw that this country was being taken advantage of by colonial rule. Then he witnessed the chaos that came from the revolution and the independence that was briefly taken over and very difficult to win. But then it all started to become bad again under a dictator.

Samuel also starts looking back on his own place in the history. With the stranger now in his life, he starts wondering about things as he did when he was young. He thinks about what it will mean to have his own land, to belong to it, what it means to have a home and lose it. An Island by Karen Jennings is a fascinating read that will have you turning pages until you get to the end to find out what happens!

Crooked Seeds is another fictional book to come out from Karen Jennings. This 2024 novel was longlisted for the Booker Prize and tells the story of a woman who comes up with the troubling past of her family while living in post-apartheid South Africa in an intriguing novel that is well worth a read.

In a small corner of a public housing complex in Cape Town, Deidre van Deventer is interrupted by a call. The South African police department is trying to get in touch with her because the government may have reclaimed her home, but now it’s become a criminal investigation scene.

This would be because several bodies have just been dug up from the land and it appears that they have been there for a while. The detectives work to find out what is going on. She is asked whether her brother belonged to certain pro-apartheid groups in the past, and whether he was building bombs on his own as part of a plot by terrorists.

Deirdre is shocked by this turn of events and cannot answer most of the questions simply because she doesn’t know herself. She just knows that the life that she always wanted has always been far away from her. Her brother either takes all the attention, or her daughter leaves her behind.

Now Deidre has to look after her mother, who is getting older. She’s also having to get by thanks to government help and charity from her neighbors, which won’t last forever. But the investigation also continues to go on, and more evidence is starting to pop up.

The detectives are pressuring Deidre to give up whatever she knows about her family’s past. Now she has to look through her own memories to try and find something better than from what exists. This is a strong novel about guilt, trauma, and the ways that we can get caught up in prisons that we have made ourselves. Read this fascinating novel to go on the journey yourself!