Author Candi Miller has found inspiration in all sorts of strange and dangerous situations – not least the oppressive nature of her birth country, South Africa, writes Lorne Jackson.

Sipping wine at a pavement table outside a fashionable Mailbox restaurant, Candi Miller is the perfect picture of poise and easy charm.

Her voice is summer afternoon sultry. Refined and delicately clipped at the edges, like a cucumber sandwich served on a silver platter.

Even the fragrant Joanna Lumley, posing next to Candi, would no longer appear to be the fragrant Joanna Lumley.

Yet, despite appearances, Candi, whose new novel Kalahari Passage has just been released, is no English rose.

She is neither delicate nor British-born, though she has lived in the West Midlands for many years.

Listening attentively as she talks, I can just about identify a ghostly South African inflection.

The land of her birth is still very much a part of her identity, as is clear from her writing.

It was in Africa that she decided to become an author. A former boyfriend helped her arrive at the decision. Though that wasn’t his intention at the time...

“This was back in my university days,” Candi recalls. “And I’d just found my boyfriend in bed with another woman – a much older woman.

“I walked into the room and she jumped out of the bed, stark naked, and put her sunglasses on.

“At that moment I knew there was something wrong with me. Because, instead of wanting to grab a frying pan and hit my boyfriend, I actually wanted to grab a pen and write down what I’d just witnessed.

“I wanted to draw a word-picture of this woman – with her sagging, ageing body – grabbing her sunglasses.

“The image was just so fascinating. That she needed to put her sunglasses on first!

“So that’s what I did. I went home and wrote a story about it, which I called The First Cut.”

Candi, who lives in Stone, Staffordshire, may have known that she wanted to be a novelist from that point onwards, but the future wasn’t so clearly mapped out for her errant lover.

“That boyfriend died. He committed suicide, actually. Though it was nothing to do with me.

“It was a lot later. He was one of those unhappy people who lost hope with himself, I guess.

“He did come to see me when I was married with children, and had moved to England.

“It was strange because I hadn’t seen him for so long, and I didn’t realise that he had come to say goodbye. Then he went back to South Africa and shot his head off.

“I think he was doing the rounds and went to all his old girlfriends to say goodbye.

“But none of us realised what he was doing.”

It took many years before Candi’s first novel, Salt and Honey, was published. The book shed light on the plight of the San tribe of South Africa. (Also known as the bushmen of the Kalahari).

Candi, who matured during the bleak apartheid years, was inspired to write the novel after unearthing horrific information about her country’s past.

“One day a story tapped me on the shoulder,” she explains. “Then it was a question whether I should write it as a piece of journalism, which would have been fine. But those stories end up in the cat litter, and I thought it was important enough to try and turn it into a novel.

“It was something that I thought was horrific, and should be told. One of those truths in South Africa that just gets swept under the carpet.

“What I read was that as late as the early 1900s, you could buy a hunting licence to shoot bushmen, like shooting a wild animal.

“So, it would cost four shillings for a licence to shoot a kudu, three shillings for a bushman woman, and five shillings for a bushman. That sort of thing.”

Kalahari Passage is a sequel of sorts, though it can be read as a stand-alone novel.

It’s the story of Koba, from the San tribe, who is forcibly repatriated to her homelands after her relationship with Mannie, the son of the white farming family who have taken her in, is discovered.

When her police guard is bribed to hand her over to a sadistic Boer, who hunted and killed her parents, she escapes.

Koba then sets out to find her tribe, though both her enemy and lover are hot on her trail. Now it’s a question of who will find her first.

The book takes a hard look at the racism of the old Africa. Though white, Candi had first hand experience of the oppressive nature of her birth country.

At university she was active against the apartheid state.

“It was a very difficult time,” she says. “Not only was it morally very complex. But for me it was slightly dangerous, too, because I was politically active.

“My phone was tapped and I was being followed by the police, because I belonged to an organisation called Black Sash.

“We used to monitor the so-called ‘fare trials’ of black political activists that were going on.

“There were other things that generally made me marked, and made me followed.

“But there were people who were in far more jeopardy than I was, so I don’t want to exaggerate my predicament.