Last week I was taken from my flat and incarcerated in hospital. They say I have cancer (which is absurd-no one in our family has ever had cancer). This is your Oom Piet's doing, of course. Your uncle is afraid I will expose him as a murderer, but there it is. You can't choose your relatives.

Since you left I have told you to stay in America, thinking you were safer there, but now you will need to come and rescue me, I'm afraid.

I hope you haven't cut your lovely curls, Poppet. Your head is the wrong shape for short hair.

Love, Mother

****

For years Kate Jensen has done her best not to think about the whys and hows and wherefores of her childhood, believing her past irrelevant to the person she's become. So her first reaction is to regard this letter as nothing more than one of her mother's paranoid delusions, which in recent years have passed as swiftly as a Highveld storm on a summer afternoon. But when Kate's attempts to contact her mother fail, she realizes that she will have to travel home to Durban to find her.

Set against the backdrop of her native land's troubled history, natural beauty, and complex contemporary society, Nature Lessons is the utterly absorbing story of that journey. As Kate searches for a widowed mother she has not seen in twenty-plus years, she encounters some unexpected obstacles and at the same time struggles to come to grips with her own demons: the guilt she felt as a white person during the apartheid era and her current inability to sustain long-term relationships with the men in her life.

Leavened with humor and full of wisdom gained from a childhood where nature's lessons were all too visible to ignore, Lynette Brasfield has written a heartbreaking but ultimately affirming novel about growing up in the shadow of mental illness.