Flyleaf (Paperback)

Violet Birkin is a teacher, and since she's paid to teach by the hour, she imagines she'll have to teach forever. But her life is changing: she's shedding her hair and her husband, the flamboyant actor Frank Eastwood Lea. When Frank's mistress falls pregnant, Violet leaves her marital home in the countryside and moves in with her poly-amorous best friend, Marina, in Kalk Bay. Flyleaf is the story of Violet's newfound spinsterhood in Marina's eccentric Bird House, the local characters she meets through Marina (including Tebogo, a Shakespearean actor manque), and her almost unbearable teaching load at a commercial cram college. At United Colleges, she encounters a kaleidoscope of young South African students with whom she develops a profound rapport. With a little help from her friends, and following a crisis precipitated by her unorthodox teaching methods, Violet gradually rises out of drudgery and despair and agrees, despite her great love for her students, to leave the college to start a bookshop called Flyleaf with Marina.