These are among the books that landed on my desk in June. Some will be reviewed in full later. – Vivien Horler

The End of Normal – Witness to the unravelling of white power in South Africa, by Max du Preez (Jonathan Ball Publishers)

I can just hear the remark: “Hey Max, you’ve lived through interesting times. Why don’t you write a book?”

I’m not being snide – I’ve lived through the same interesting times (he’s about a year older than I), but he has been much more front and centre. He’s also a bloody good, articulate writer whose perspective as an Afrikaner from a traditional middle-class Christian Nationalist family and one who came to reject much of what it stood for, makes his observations fascinating.

He had a very sheltered youth – he writes he discovered the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Dylan et al only when he went to university in Stellenbosch (whereas I was taken to see A Hard Day’s Night when I was 12.)

After beginning his professional life as a reporter on Die Burger (we were magistrates’ court reporters together in 1973, with me working for the Cape Argus), he moved to Beeld in Johannesburg which is why he was in Soweto reporting on escalating tensions there early on June 16, 1976.

He describes the police shooting that day as “the single most impactful event since South Africa became a unitary state in 1910”.

He goes on: “The Soweto uprising of 1976 altered the entire mood of the country, the climate of opinion, and set in motion a series of events that changed the course of South African history forever. It was the beginning of the end of apartheid.”

In his introduction he says this book is in no way a full history of the past 50 years, nor a definitive explanation of the psyche of Afrikaners and white South Africans. “It is merely my personal, subjective effort to give some insights into that soul.”

I’ve started The End of Normal, and am finding it extremely readable.

Of All Things, We Need Hope, by Sally Cranswick (Modjaji Books)

The premise of this debut novel is a strange one: Heather’s son has been killed, and the young man accused of his death has been jailed for 20 years.

The day after the sentencing she looks up the prison and discovers it is 300% full. Some of the inmates sleep on the floor as there are not enough bunk beds in their communal cell. There are rats.

Heather is appalled. What if the man, Smith, dies in this ghastly prison? Would anyone ever know? She decides to visit him.

Her lawyer is against it. No good will come of it, he advises. “We’ve got the sentence we were after: now it’s time for you to get on with your life.”

Her husband, Richard, is trying to get on with his, and encourages her to do the same. She could mentor at a children’s home, visit friends, get on with work. But Heather sees no point in this. She needs to visit Smith.

And for two decades she does, doing whatever she can to keep him safe in prison so that he can eventually come home to her.

The rest of her family eventually reject her and she loses pretty well everything. But none of that matters if Smith can be saved.

This is Cranswick’s first novel, but she is also the author of a book of short stories: Women Out of Water. She lives in Cape Town.

Millwood, by Tom Cottrell (TMC Publications)

This novel begins with a modern-day murder in Johannesburg, and the delayed discovery of a rotting body.

We are then transported to the Knysna of the 1870s, where Charles Frederick Osborne, a talented road engineer, is working on the building of the Great Cape Road between George and Knysna, under the supervision of the legendary Thomas Bain. Their relationship is not cordial, because Bain believes Osborne is distracted by dreams of gold.

And Bain is right, because Osborne, born in California as the son of a successful gold prospector, believes there is gold in the hills behind Knysna.

In 2013 author Tom Cottrell, the blurb tells us, was unwillingly drawn into the unsolved murder of his cousin, Kevin Millwood Osborne, to whom the book is dedicated.

His search for answers stirs something else, “an inheritance of guilt and shame stretching back to 1876”, when his great-great grandfather did something that would haunt the Osborne-Cottrell family for generations.

This story is part memoir, part mystery, with some magical realism. In the first few pages I have read, it certainly looks like something I’d like to get my teeth into.

Cottrell is a former ultramarathon runner and author of The Runners’ Guide to Road Races in South Africa. He has also written two other books on running. Millwood is his first novel.

A Bluebird in a Baobab – A memoir, by Jeri Lynn Johnson Russell (Self-published)

Jeri Lynn Johnson Russell is an American-born trauma therapist and homeopath who fell in love with Africa, particularly Botswana, Eswatini and Ghana.

On Thanksgiving Day in 2008, while she is preparing a celebratory dinner for family and friends at her adopted home in London, she has a message from a woman who runs a homeopathic charity in Botswana.

Would she be interested in teaching homeopathy and work in homeopathic clinics in southern Africa? She would. By February 2009 Jeri is in Botswana, having finally passed the test to drive a manual car.

She discovers that Africa is where she feels she truly belongs, and muses: “Many of us save all year to have a moment of this on vacation. We miss so much in our air-conditioned world, away from children and each other, we in the west are so busy being prolific and efficient, alone in a cubicle. As I gaze at this bustling scene of women working together, this seems to be the most natural rhythm for humans.”

Here is a sample of the books that landed on my desk in May 2026, and for once they’re all South African. Some will be reviewed in full later. – Vivien Horler

The Boy in the Barrel – Based on the true story of a boy who lost his childhood and found himself, by Eric Lieberman (Batya Bricker)

In the late 1890s in Vilna, Lithuania, six-year-old Izzy Lieberman lives with his family – his mother Rachel who smells of flour and woodsmoke, his father Abraham and his five brothers and sisters.

One night the soldiers come on horseback to take Jewish boys for service to the Tsar’s military machine. The three Lieberman boys are hidden in the root cellar, and survive. But the next day, when the family emerges, their area of town is smoking and devastated. That is the night Abraham loses his faith.

Over the next two years things fall apart for the Lieberman family, and it is decided Abraham will take Izzy and scout out a home in Africa, in Cape Town. Later the rest of the family will join them.

But somehow, in the clatter and confusion of the port at Cape Town, Izzy and Abraham are separated. Abraham is taken for a Boer and locked up in the Breakwater Prison. Izzy, now eight, is all by himself in a strange land, where he does not know any of the languages.

He becomes a street boy, whose only home is a barrel. It is the beginning of a childhood of struggle.

Eleven years later, 19-year-old Izzy arrives in Johannesburg and discovers the truth about his family.

Under a Blood Red Sky – A memoir, by Annemarie van Niekerk, translated by Michiel Heyns (Tafelberg)

This may be a memoir, but it opens like a crime thriller: it’s a Saturday afternoon in a tiny farming hamlet somewhere between Indwe and Elliot in the Eastern Cape.

Tannie Hermien Gouws, who is 88, has nodded off in her chair while watching TV. Her son Ruben, the retired principal of a little farm school, has watched TV with his mother and is now closing up his adjoining home on the farm Pinevale for the night.

Then two former pupils arrive, and ask him to open up Tannie Hermien’s shop so they can buy cigarettes. He reluctantly agrees – it’s late Saturday afternoon and this is his time – and they trail over the road towards the shop. They are joined by a third man, who produces a knife and demands access to the safe.

Within minutes, Ruben and his mother are dead. It’s just another rural black-on-white murder.

But Ruben has been friends with Annamarie van Niekerk, once a lecturer in Afrikaans literature at Wits and a former editor of Kwela Books. Now she lives in The Hague in the Netherlands, where she writes books and book reviews.

Just back from a holiday in Paris, Van Niekerk gets a message from a cousin of Ruben’s: “Ouma and Ruben were murdered tonight on Pinevale.”

Two days later Van Niekerk is on her way to the funerals.

The bulk of the memoir is made up of three journeys. The first is between Port Elizabeth (now Gqeberha) and Umtata (now Mtata). This section tells us about Van Niekerk’s youth, her politicisation and her exposure to the violence endemic to the land of her birth.

The second journey is between The Hague and the Eastern Cape, when Van Niekerk heads home for Ruben and Tannie Hermien’s funeral in 2015. The third is another journey from the Netherlands to the Eastern Cape about 18 months later.

The memoir was first published in Dutch under the title Om het hart terug te brengen in 2021, and then in Afrikaans under the title Onder ’n bloed rooi hemel in 2023.

The English version has just been published. From what I’ve seen, this looks like a gripping story about being a South African over the past 50 or so years. Reviewers of the Dutch and Afrikaans versions describe it as unforgettable and moving, and “a tender book illuminating some harsh realities”. Several reviews say every South African should read it.

Lifting the Lid, by Bonnie Espie (Kwela)

Winifred and Sylvie live in the rural village of Riviervalleij where they run The Novel Eatery – a combination book and coffee shop. They also have a couple of secrets, one of them being the body of Solomon, who is in Sylvie’s freezer. And they don’t know how he got there.

But someone in the village knows something about their side hustle, they think gloomily, and this hustle is not the sort of thing they want publicised. But what can they do – they have to keep the bank balance healthy and the Novel Eatery isn’t doing that by itself.

Now the excitement in the village is that a wine TV reality show is coming to town, and that has to be good for business. But reality shows mean cameras all over the place, and who knows what may be spotted through a lens?

The Which Word, by Catriona Ross (Mirari Press)

All by itself, on a page where an epigraph would usually be found in a book, appears this brief sentence: “This book contains a lot of sex.” And a shout on the cover from author and columnist Paige Nick describes the book as “sexy as f***”.

Everyone, we are told, has their own word, and it is one that will stay with you for all your life. Your word will find you, whether you can handle it or not.

Rafi Paterson has moved into a gated community in Cape Town called The Plex, where every front door is painted a different colour. But it’s not a bog-standard complex, as Rafi soon realises

There seem to be some interesting male neighbours, which Rafi finds promising. And a fabulous fortnight beckons when Rafi’s sister Elvi and the glamorous Bruna, who was once an Italian exchange student with the Paterson family for a year, come to The Plex for a reunion of the “godsisters”.

Then an art academic disappears after a party at The Plex, and the godsisters discover a sex diary under Rafi’s bed, which they believe has all the answers.