The Fifth Mrs Brink is Karina M. Szczurek's memoir of her life before, during and after her marriage to André P. Brink. Polish-born Karina was twenty-seven when she met the acclaimed writer, forty-two years her senior, and they spent a decade together. Here she chronicles their relationship, from their first encounter in Vienna, Austria, and moving across continents to be with each other, to finding calm and stability in their married life in Cape Town, and finally facing the challenges of André's deteriorating health in the last year of his life.

This soul-baring account is also the story of two interwoven writing lives, Karina's burgeoning and André's in its final phase. It is a diary of creative dissolution and knitting back together, a homage to a marriage reality tragically cut short but also to a love to last a lifetime.