The Girl From Colesberg

She changed her name, her age and her language. The past still found her.

Colesberg, 1885. Hester du Plessis is seventeen, the eldest daughter in a Karoo shopkeeper's house, with a petticoat hem full of coins nobody knows about. When her father starts arranging her future over the supper table, she buys a train ticket to a lie and doesn't look back.

In Port Elizabeth she becomes someone else: Elizabeth, twenty-two, a girl who speaks only English. She scrubs laundry, collects sentences from the lodgers, and minds the motherless son of a quiet English builder with secrets of his own. But a voice on Main Street knows her real name, and a letter from home brings her father closer every week.

Then word comes of gold on the Witwatersrand, and the only way north runs straight back through Colesberg.

Told over three weeks on an ox wagon bound for the new goldfields at Langlaagte, The Girl from Colesberg is the story of a young woman who tries to outrun everything she was, and slowly learns that the past isn't chasing her. It's hers.

Based on the true story of the author's own family, pieced together from a marriage register, a death notice and the few facts that were handed down, this is historical fiction about running away, starting over, and the people who make room for us anyway.