Till we can keep an animal is about a middle-aged woman who was attacked, raped and murdered in her home by armed robbers, Voysey-Briag says ‘I keep her alive so that her story continues. I invite her family members, those who are alive and dead, to tell their stories through her. She is the main protagonist and the narrator’. She said the novel was written from the shame and sadness that exists in this country: ‘I wanted to pose questions. We love our grandmothers and grandfathers, our families, but what did they perpetuate the system, to make apartheid work and flourish? That’s what I explore in the manuscript, the cruelty that has always existed in South Africa, the violence over 400 years’.