Set in the early 1830s, The Slave Book recounts the last five years of slavery at the Cape of Good Hope.

The novel opens with Sangora van Java on the block, a 'Mohametan' slave who is being sold for preaching his belief to others. Andries de Villiers, a hard-nosed wine farmer, purchases Sangora, despite his suspicion that the tall slave could spell trouble. On impulse, he also bids for Sangora's 16-year-old stepdaughter, Somiela, but not for the girl's mother - thereby separating the family.

The first days on Zoetewater are traumatic, but both father and stepdaughter survive and find comfort in the unity amongst the slaves on the farm. It is when Harman Kloot, an Afrikaner of mixed blood, arrives from the interior that a second, major crisis develops - Harman is torn between duty to his group and the love of a girl who belongs to a different culture and faith.

Whatever decision he makes will be seen as betrayal, either of his own people or of the slave community with whom he has found common ground.

In her award-winning novel, Eyes of the Sky, Rayda Jacobs explores the complex and interconnected lives of the settlers and the enslaved in eighteenth century South Africa. Controlled by the Dutch for over a century, The Cape of Good Hope has witnessed the horrific enslavement of over sixty thousand men and women. In this impactful historical novel, we follow the saga of the Kloots; an old farming family recently settled on the edge of Cape Colony in the late eighteenth century. As they struggle to live off the the harsh, barren landscape, tensions begin to rise to breaking point. While some are determined to despise the indigenous inhabitants of the Cape, one young member of the family, Harman, takes it upon himself to bridge the gap between the two groups and prevent them from mutual destruction. To fail risks the extinction of them all. Full of dark history and unexpected twists, Eyes of the Sky is a remarkable tale of identity, betrayal, forbidden love, and the fusing of people and cultures.

Heartwarming yet tough, this unforgettable story centers around a brave, young black girl named Joonie from Grassy Park, South Africa. When both her uncle and local priest attempt to take sexual advantage of her, Joonie refuses their advances. For all her fortitude, however, Joonie is slow to learn from the past--especially with respect to relationships--and she soon finds herself single and pregnant. A journey of self-discovery, this narrative chronicles Joonie's coping with a shocking revelation about her identity in a foreign country and celebrates her indomitable spirit.

"I left my soul at the foot of Table Mountain. I want it back." In this powerful, poignant and distinctively South African collection of short stories, Rayda Jacobs - leaving suddenly for Canada at the age of 21, to return for good only 27 years later - seeks to understand the deep marks that South Africa has left upon her. The character of Sabah runs like a rich thread through the collection, as Jacobs takes the reader on an intense, semi-autobiographical journey which explores childhood, exile after being found in possession of a white card, and return to an altered South Africa in 1995. Other stories reveal South Africans tellingly to each other - the elderly woman frightened by the young man at the garden gate, the shack-dwelling family ruthlessly compromised by the housing "agent", the muslim daughter who must help with the ritual washing of her mother's body for burial. Frequently funny, often serious, always deceptively simple - these "postcards" are the compassionate yet challenging creation of a gifted storyteller.

Set in the desolate landscape of the interior of the Cape in the late eighteenth century, Eyes of the Sky is a South African saga about identity, betrayal, forbidden love, and the coming together of diverse cultures vying for the scant resources of an arid land. The novel takes us into the hearts of the early people of the Cape - the settlers who had to be rough and tough to bend the wilderness to their will, and the brown-skinned people who found themselves "almost pushed off teh end of the earth."