The Voluptuous Delights of Peanut Butter and Jam

Nyree and Cia O’Callohan live on a remote farm in the east of what was Rhodesia in the late 1970s. Beneath the dripping vines of the Vumba rainforest, and under the tutelage of their heretical grandfather, theirs is a seductive childhood laced with African paganism, mangled Catholicism and the lore of the Brothers Grimm. Their world extends as far as the big fence, erected to keep out the ‘Terrs’ whom their father is off fighting. The two girls know little beyond that until the arrival, from the outside world, of ‘the bastard’, their orphaned cousin Ronin, who is set to poison their idyll for ever.

Lauren Liebenberg

grew up in Rhodesia during the civil war. When still a child, she left what had become Zimbabwe, following her gold miner father south to Johannesburg, where she still lives today. She has an MBA form the University of Witwatersrand and is married with two children. The Voluptuous Delights of Peanut Butter and Jam is her first novel.

Lauren Liebenberg's q & a

What sparked The Voluptuous Delights of Peanut Butter and Jam?
It began as sepia-tinted and borrowed memories cross bred with a little wistfulness on my part.

Where and when is the novel set?
It is set in what was Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, in the crucible of war there in the late 1970s - a country in its death throes. The story itself though unfolds in the fragile, decaying idyll of a rotting farmhouse in the shadow of the eastern Vumba mountains.

Do you have a favourite character in the novel?
My favourite character is Oupa, my odious but endearing old heretic.

What's your favourite children's book and why?
I was raised on Enid Blyton as a child and still have the fondest memories of her stories. They even permeate the eclectic infusion of influences in Voluptuous Delights - minglingbastardised Catholicism and the African pagan cult of the dead with the winsomeness of The Folk of the Faraway Tree.