My Midnight

About the Book

Ana Paula da Costa and Daniel Van Der Meeren are two hard working, self-assured, well off, end of 20th century intellectuals. Their familial and professional demands lead them to seek an escape, which develops into an addicting hobby. Their mutual hunger for information added to their solitary and contemptuous characteristics are perfectly fulfilled by the upcoming Internet.  Paula is a forty-one year old architect and lives in South Africa where she settled after fleeing Angola. She owns a designer store that is partially run with her partner Joana and an imported tiling business, jointly run with her husband Carlos. Danny is a thirty four year old medical doctor, practicing in a small village in Belgium. They are both married with children. Paula’s marriage lacks excitement, and is clearly showing signs of the "démon de midi". Danny is till struggling with the psychological aftermath of a short affair his wife Martine had a few years back.    One Friday night in the summer of 1996, Paula logs on to the Internet to do some research on serotonin as she has volunteered for an experimental ‘tryptanol cocktail’. Carlos is in Italy on business and her children, Bruno and Alexi, are spending the weekend in Cape Town.  Accidentally, she clicks on a website link and ends up at a virtual Café. She is confused and amused. She reads the last message about Prozac, which seems like the answer to her predicament. Without a further thought, she thanks Danny for the unasked-for answer.  This innocent butting statement is the onset of a remarkable and yet controversial relationship. In spite of having completely different, personal and geographical backgrounds, a strong bond is formed during the coming months. In the early stages Paula recounts the traumatic exodus from Angola in 1975, where her paternal great-grandparents settled in the 19th century, her acclimatization in an alien country and her present way of life in the new South Africa, where the alarming crime rate has brought barbed wire and burglar bars en vogue and awareness has become second nature. In contrast, Danny shares with Paula his peaceful, culturally rich and Nordic-like upbringing in a Belgian village and at the beginning Paula succeeds in infusing some Latin blood in him.  The novel depicts the wonder and aggravation of a cultural clash, the flexibility of unwritten conducts. It’s the story of an unlikely rapport.

About the Author

Betty Pontes de Oliveira was born and raised in Angola, descendant of 1800’s settlers. She fled to neighbouring South Africa in 1975, where she still lives, during the height of the Angolan conflict. She is a civil and mining engineer and is married with two sons. At the age of twenty-one she wrote two technical books for her thesis - ‘Piling foundations’ and ‘A study of Angolan mineral waters’. ‘My midnight’ is her first work of fiction and she is currently writing a second novel, ‘Xitaca’. Eddy Bral was born in 1962 in Ertvelde, East-Flanders, Belgium. He attended Gent University to become a general practitioner in 1987. He wrote short stories, a book of poems ‘Musing on Wuthering Heights’ and a novel ‘Wrong number’ in Dutch. Last year he wrote the English lyrics for the Belgian musical ‘Cédric’. Married with three daughters, he works as a family doctor in a Flemish rural village. Betty and Eddy joined forces to write this novel based on some true-life events, shared and witnessed incidents and a fertile imagination.