What Lies Beyond and Beneath

Nadia Davids discusses the ‘thin places’ between life and death in her new novel ‘Cape Fever.’

By Katya ApekinaMarch 7, 2026

• Fiction

I’VE BEEN FRIENDS with Nadia Davids—a playwright, novelist, and scholar from Cape Town, South Africa—for a few years now. She and I recently wandered around the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena together, discussing what the pandemic did to our brains and our sense of time. Her new novel, Cape Fever, takes place after a pandemic—not COVID-19 but the other one, the Great Influenza pandemic of 1918. It’s not so much a major plot point in the book, but the characters are like us: they live in the wake of this global event and are also deeply affected by the isolation and trauma of mass death.

Death haunts the pages of Cape Fever, which I read in one sitting, each page building tension and rage. The gothic thriller—set after World War I in a city modeled on Davids’s hometown—captures the viciousness and warping that happens to people living in an oppressive colonial system. It is told from the point of view of Soraya, a young Muslim woman, who arrives at her new job as a maid for Mrs. Hattingh, a British widow living in a deteriorating house she can’t afford filled with spirits she cannot see—but Soraya can.

Mrs. Hattingh’s casual cruelty and hypocrisy feel like an inevitable extension of the systems of power they’re living under. As Soraya retreats into her imagination, the thin places she has access to are as much an escape from her reality as they are an escape to something deeper and transcendent. There are not many books that tackle these subjects and yet leave the reader with a sense of hope, and I don’t mean a corny, artificial, tacked-on sense of hope, but a genuine one.

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KATYA APEKINA: You told me that this book came to you all at once, but that it took you a while to write—is that right?

NADIA DAVIDS: That’s exactly right. The outline came to me one morning, just as I was waking up, still half in a dream state: a house and two women—a servant and her employer. The servant says she cannot read (a necessary deception), the employer offers to write letters on her behalf to her fiancé, and subsequently the women become entangled. I immediately set about trying to write it and got precisely nowhere. Usually when I can’t find an idea’s form or voice, I let it go and move on to something else. In this case, I moved on to other projects, but I didn’t—or couldn’t—let the story go. I carried it with me across two emigrations, marriage, children, jobs, plays, short stories, research, another novel. Every so often, I’d think about it, try to write a little on it, but it felt as though the characters and I were communicating through thick glass.

In the fall of 2023, I picked the text up again. We’d moved to California the year before, and I had a writing residency ahead of me. I’m not sure what made the writing suddenly possible, perhaps the time available or my age. The idea had come to me in my late twenties, and I was then in my mid-forties and had developed a different relationship to loss and the long imprint of generational memory. The moment I understood that it was set in a fictionalized version of Cape Town and that Soraya was Cape Muslim, that she came from the community I was born and raised in, something shifted. After years of being on nodding terms with the story, I was suddenly fully immersed: the other characters appeared, and I could see, in detail, Soraya and Mrs. Hattingh’s homes, their streetscapes; I could feel the rhythm of their days and understand what and how they hid from one another. I lived with the story for 15 years, but I only wrote in earnest for two.

Your characters are haunted by history: Soraya’s father by his grandmother’s experiences as an enslaved person, Mrs. Hattingh and her friends by their sons’ losses in World War I, not to mention enslavement, colonialism, and the systems of oppression that haunt the book. But there are also literal ghosts in the story, previous servants who linger in the house, the Gray Women. As a person with a creative impulse, the line between imagination and clairvoyance becomes blurred, and Soraya has access to thin places where ghosts live. What’s your experience with ghosts? Was the book always going to be a ghost story?

I knew the novel would be at least in part about hauntings and the haunted—the longue durée of personal and political grief—but I didn’t know there would be ghosts. The psychic intrusions experienced by Soraya are as much a way of metabolizing the profound cruelty of colonialism as they are about private loss. I wanted her feverish, rich imagination to be a place of retreat, agency, and survival. The ghosts became part of that.

I used the post–World War I setting because I wanted to think through the aftermath of that war in the colonies. I remember the first time I encountered World War I poetry: I was in high school, and we read Wilfred Owen’s exquisite poem “Futility.” It made me weep. It was the first time I’d read a young person’s writing about that period, and the lines “Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides / Full-nerved, still warm, too hard to stir? / Was it for this the clay grew tall?” struck me as the most beautifully written, damning condemnation of war and violence imaginable.

My own experience with ghosts, with spectral trace, the uncanny, that “thin place” you describe so beautifully, has been lifelong. I think most people raised in Muslim families in Cape Town would say the same. I have early memories of my mother, her aunts, and her sisters speaking about ghosts, jinn, and luck in ways that made it all seem both mysterious and completely ordinary. There was always an understanding that the world was shared; that not everything was explicable (and that it was arrogance to assume it was); and that, beyond the arena of the domestic, the city itself was shaped by a painful, unresolved history, and that pain and inequality blurred time. In thinking through your question about clairvoyance, imagination, and hauntology, I’m realizing that my introduction to the uncanny was through women who were powerful, funny, persuasive storytellers talking among themselves, so perhaps that was the seed.

I have some political anxiety about describing writing as mysterious because historically, at least in the Western canon, women writers/novelists would disassociate from claiming their own creation as a way of disguising their own ambitions (one of the Brontë sisters would say she went into a “trance” when writing) because writing was the domain of men. That said, some of my deepest writing pleasures have come in precisely those moments of flow, that trance state, slip state, feeling state, knowing state. The closest comparison, I think, is the moment actors talk about, when they’re in an intensive rehearsal process and they make the first true contact with a character.

But writing is mysterious, at least when it’s any good! It is egoless too sometimes—in the sense that it feels like an external stream, though it’s flushing through your consciousness.

Yes, political hesitations aside, I agree! And those moments of ego dissolution are what keep me going. There’s such a sense of wonder to them. You once said to me that all writers are partly clairvoyant, and I love this idea because both activities are about trying to sense, understand, and then describe what someone else is thinking and feeling. A lot of this book felt as though I were reaching up or down, pulling at something both within and outside myself into view.

I suppose I land somewhere in the middle: I want women to claim their creations (we so rarely hear male writers declaring the provenance of their work being anything but themselves), and I want us to feel free to describe the wild mystery of it. I do take the relationship between creativity, the imagination, and the unconscious very seriously, so I pay attention to how archetypal energies and dreams manifest in my life and work, and I think about how to draw into this world what lies beyond and beneath.

You’re also a playwright—how has playwriting or theater inspired this book? Are the processes of writing fiction and plays somehow separate and distinct? How do you know when something is a play, a movie, or a novel? Did this story ever exist as anything but a novel?

I have this notion that stories know and understand their own form before they take them, and the writer must work out what that form is. I’ve had essays transform into short stories and what I thought was the start of a novel become a play. Something happens at some indiscernible point in the process (there’s no predicting when—I’ve tried!) and the thing either becomes itself or falls to bits.

Writing plays and writing fiction are, in my experience, different processes with different risks and pleasures. Plays are all about the speech and the performance act. They’re about using dialogue or monologue to create characters that simultaneously offer us a glimpse into their internal worlds and drive the plot forward. There is limited time to convey the story, so playwrights always have one eye on the clock … Live performance is also a communal, shared experience: audience and artists gather together at a set hour for an agreed amount of time, and they co-create meaning. The rush and immediacy of live performance can be enormously gratifying, but things can also go horribly wrong: lights can fuse, a line can get dropped, a performance can be hobbled by an actor who is having an off night … The writer, in the moment of performance, has ceded all control.

Fiction, on the other hand, is private. It’s an agreement between reader and writer, but there’s no set time—it’s done at the reader’s pleasure and convenience. The writer has no control over which sentence is where the reader sets the book down, which moment they go off to make tea.

I think playwriting has given me a solid ear for dialogue. I approach dialogue in a novel the same way I do in a play: not just as an exchange but also to tell us about the character through language, sentence structure, and rhythm. It’s also a way to nudge the plot along.

Mrs. Hattingh seems like she was very fun to write: the villain, grandiose, oblivious, unable to see past herself but sort of trying to make gestures at it. She’s awful but also pathetic: her humanity is warped by the racist system she lives in. How did you feel toward her as you wrote her?

This is a wonderful description of Mrs. Hattingh—“the villain, grandiose, oblivious.” I’ll remember it! I’d also add “histrionic.” And yes, as ever, your writer insight is spot-on. I did have fun writing her (when I wasn’t furious with her). I also like to think that Soraya had some pleasure (and felt empowered) in rendering her.

Alice Hattingh emerges from two places: the first, my overexposure as a child to BBC historical dramas (the grande dame figure, funny, imperious, frightening); the second, growing up in South Africa, in what was once a colonial outpost (and continues to bear the trace and shape of that history). The Mrs. Hattinghs I encounter in books, films, and television shows are amusing scene-stealers. The ones I encounter in real life are not. They are unseeing and unwilling to see, and the radiating damage, personal and political, caused by that refusal is catastrophic.

A friend said Alice Hattingh was “unhinged and delusional,” and he’s right, of course, but her sense of herself as progressive in her ruling-class circle is not inaccurate. She is progressive compared to her friends; she can comfort herself that she’s a “good” employer (even if the bar is on the ground). She’s as much an expression of the limits and fault lines of liberalism as Soraya is a figure of radical imagination and freedom-dreaming.

But Alice Hattingh needed to be complex too—the person she loves most is taken from her by the same system she benefits from. Empire is extractive at every level, and while Mrs. Hattingh and her women friends are beneficiaries of it, they’re also expected to willingly and eagerly sacrifice their children in service to its goals. That understanding allowed me to have empathy for her. I couldn’t have written her and spent all that time with her if I didn’t. But empathy is not absolution.

Mrs. Hattingh takes it upon herself to edit the letters that she’s supposedly transcribing. Have you ever had a nightmarish editing experience yourself?

I have. Not with fiction, but with a play, and it was a deeply corrosive experience. But I think the mirroring for me around Alice Hattingh’s rewriting of Soraya’s words is less about creative meddling and more about having grown up under Apartheid and witnessing how the state could, through legislation and censorship, reorder reality through a combination of rewriting and/or forced omission. I saw early and often who was allowed to speak, who had to fight—sometimes at fatal cost—to speak, and how my own community’s history could be mangled and misrepresented by the state. What happens between Soraya and Mrs. Hattingh during the letter-writing is deeply personal and a terrible encroachment on Soraya’s interior world (beyond the control Mrs. Hattingh already exerts on her exterior world) but it’s rooted in a wider politics of agency and legislated inequality. Mrs. Hattingh’s creative forays are driven by a desire to control Soraya and soothe her own loneliness. Soraya’s creative energies are animated by very different forces: ancestral connection, spirituality, defiance, the making of the self through art.

This ties back to something Soraya’s dad says about two types of creators—“the one who loves and the one who is empty.” I was thinking about that in connection to Mrs. Hattingh, but also about the new prevalence of AI, the ultimate empty. Is that what separates good art from bad, the impulse behind it and the absence of love?

I’m not sure, but you’ve got me thinking! I’ve made work in the past that comes from a place of deep love, but it had not succeeded at a formal level. I do think that one has to be in the realm of feeling and active thinking when making art because that feeling leaves an imprint on the work and becomes one of the places where the reader or viewer and the artist meet.

Soraya has an interior, creative world that comes from a place of love and deep affirmation of her people, place, and self, one that Mrs. Hattingh cannot access. Her exterior self is in a constant state of performance: the voice she uses when she speaks to her employer is a self-protective invention that doesn’t mirror her internal narration. The creativity of her father, Khalil, who is an Islamic calligrapher, emerges from a wellspring of spirituality, devotion, and an unshakable belief in the eternal.

Hard agree on AI as “the ultimate empty.”

Now that the book is out in the world, does it feel out of your system? Do you feel changed by the process of writing it?

I miss spending time with the characters much more than I would have thought. Writing over a long period like this gives life such a sense of richness; there’s always this other world waiting.

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Nadia Davids is a South African playwright, novelist, academic, the former president of PEN South Africa, and the 2024 Caine Prize winner for her short story “Bridling.” She lives in California.

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Featured image: Photo of Nadia Davids by John Gutierrez.