Cactus Letters, by Jayne Galassi

One Sunday afternoon, friends and family are gathered for lunch in a lush garden on the KwaZulu-Natal South Coast. But the guests are distracted in the moments it takes a four-year-old to drown in the swimming pool.

In the years that follow the tragedy, the boy’s grandmother, Dorothy, retreats into an inner world. Her daughter-in-law, Meridian, comes to care for Dorothy in the final weeks of her life. She is puzzled to find the once perfect garden in a state of devastation and neglect. Through the aged woman’s letters about love and loss and strange cryptic messages written in the garden, she begins to find answers to her own life.

But Dorothy’s letters also reveal an appalling secret.