The Lying Days.(Blood Kin)(Interview)

Byline: ELIZABETH SCHMIDT editor: Valerie Steiker

With Blood Kin, a fable of power and complicity, South African author Ceridwen Dovey is poised to make the debut of the season .

Part erotic thriller, part menacing political allegory, South African--born Ceridwen Dovey's haunting debut, Blood Kin (Viking), is set in the aftermath of a military coup and follows the fortunes of the newly deposed president's chef, barber, and portraitist. Imprisoned in the state's grand summer residence by its newi leader, "the Commander," the three men must transfer their loyalty--and their professional skills--to stay alive. In this stripped-down Kafkaesque fable, which takes place in an unnamed country at an unspecified time, Dovey infuses each character with humanity, and brilliantly reveals how banal acts like cooking and shaving can become charged with longing and political intent: "The prawns are gray and succulent, with fetus eyes, and the sea snails have withdrawn into their shells and stoppered them against violence."

Over a glass of wine in Greenwich Village, the 27-year-old Dovey, a second-year anthropology graduate student at New York University, describes the period of post-college restlessness that led her to writing. The daughter of academics who had left South Africa in 1982 because of political unrest, Dovey moved to Cape Town after graduating from Harvard to research a documentary on President Thabo Mbeki. "He has always been seen as quite aloof, and I thought about doing a film about his chef and his ...