Expecting Rain - Synopsis

Sarah Butler

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The initial idea for Expecting Rain came from two places: time I spent after graduating working with an educational development project in South Africa and living with a family in the township of Soshanguve; and working with asylum seekers and refugees when I was literature development officer in Leicester from 2000 – 2003. I was interested in the concept of exile, and how one’s imagined life corresponds with or contradicts one’s actual life in a new country. I also wanted to look at how people from different classes and cultural backgrounds can, or can’t, relate to each other.

Expecting Rain has two main characters. The first is Saartjie Dibakwane, a domestic migrant worker from South Africa who has come to England for a 'better life' and enough money to send home for her terminally ill brother, and save to bring her young daughter Lebo to England. The second is Janine Thompson, a woman in her early thirties who is stuck in a cycle of grief – which manifests itself in obsessive compulsive behaviour – after the death of her daughter eighteen months previously. The two women form a difficult relationship, based on mistrust and half-truths. A 'white lie' secures Janine’s help in getting Saartjie out of a difficult relationship with her employer, but puts added pressure on Janine’s relationship with her husband and disrupts any basis for a friendship. The news that Janine's father is dying of lung cancer, and the subsequent revelation that Janine's real father is actually a South African man she has never heard of, draws the two women uncomfortably close. The novel ends with a journey to South Africa and a negotiation of power which, ultimately, neither wins.

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