- published: 17 Jun 2015
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Shades is a historical novel written by Marguerite Poland. The book was first published in 1993 by Penguin books. The novel is supposedly based upon the ancestors of Marguerite Poland and their struggle to survive and cope in the harsh South African environment.
The plot revolves around a family, the Farboroughs who lived in the Eastern Cape of South Africa in the early 1900s, in a small community known as St Matthias. The story follows Walter Brownley, explaining what life was like in South Africa just before the first Boer War. African exploitation, as seen in the mining on the Highveld, is a major theme of the story.
The entire story takes place in South Africa.
Shade commonly refers to the shadow cast when something obscures light.
Shade may also refer to:
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century.
Further definition of the genre is historically difficult. The construction of the narrative, the plot, the way reality is created in the works of fiction, the fascination of the character study, and the use of language are usually discussed to show a novel's artistic merits. Most of these requirements were introduced in the 16th and 17th centuries, in order to give fiction a justification outside the field of factual history.
The fictional narrative, the novel's distinct "literary" prose, specific media requirements (the use of paper and print), a characteristic subject matter that creates both intimacy and a typical epic depth can be seen as features that developed with the Western (and modern) market of fiction. The separation of a field of histories from a field of literary fiction fueled the evolution of these features in the last 400 years.