A Sin of Omission

A powerful novel about innocent faith and an abuse of trust.

Winner of The Sunday Times CNA Literary Awards. Shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize Torn from his parents and tribe as a boy in the 1870s, Stephen Mzamane is picked by the Anglican church to train at the Missionary College in Canterbury to be a rural preacher in Southern Africa’s Cape Colony. He is a brilliant success but troubles stalk him: his unresolved relationship with his family and people, the condescension of church leaders towards their own native pastors, and That Woman—seen once in a photograph and never forgotten. And now he has to find his mother and take her a message that will break her heart. In this raw and compelling story, Marguerite Poland employs her considerable experience as a writer and specialist in South African languages to recreate the polarised, duplicitous world of Victorian colonialism and its betrayal of the very people it claimed to be enlightening.