The House on Sugarbush Road, set in post-apartheid Johannesburg shortly after the 1994 election of Nelson Mandela, is the story of the intertwining lives of a once prominent liberal Afrikaner family and Beauty Mapule, their domestic servant of more than thirty years. Cook's intimately interconnected and finely drawn characters are white, black, rich, poor, beautiful, ugly, old and young; they are also hustlers, do-gooders, petty criminals and sensualists, heading towards dramatic explosions both inevitable and unexpected.

Méira Cook is the award-winning author of the novels The House on Sugarbush Road, which won the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award, and Nightwatching, which won the Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction. She has also published five poetry collections, most recently Monologue Dogs, which was shortlisted for the 2016 Lansdowne Prize for Poetry and for the 2016 McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award. She won the CBC Poetry Prize in 2007 and the inaugural Walrus Poetry Prize in 2012. In 2011 she served as Writer in Residence at the University of Manitoba’s Centre for Creative Writing and Oral Culture, and was the 2013–14 Writer in Residence at the Winnipeg Public Library. Born and raised in Johannesburg, South Africa, she now lives in Winnipeg.

Méira Cook's profile page

"Cook has written a powerful, lyrical novel that ends quietly but with profound impact." - Quill & Quire, starred review

"I finished The House on Sugarbush Road stunned at the sheer life on its pages. I felt I had seen South Africa in a way that will always shape my thinking about it. The beauty of the language, the author's eye for moving and incongruous detail, her understanding of the searing realities of post-Apartheid South Africa - all are extraordinary. What Meira&nbspCook especially grasps and explores with great delicacy are the ties that bind her characters together: a shared past, but also greed, need, and something approaching love." - Joan Thomas, author of Curiosity