Despite the frivolity of the holidays coming up, some seriously serious books landed on my desk in November. Fortunately two are written with a light touch. The others worthy but look extremely interesting. Some of these books will be reviewed in full later. We’ll start with the two lighter reads. – Vivien Horler

Loony Birds, Lion Men, and the Snake that was a Gerbil – 20 of the Best Bush Tales from Southern Africa by David Bristow (Jacana)

Writer, editor and adventurer David Bristow collects stories. He actually produced the four-volume Stories from the Veld. Anything that comes in four volumes is a bit daunting, but in this book he has selected 20 of the best tales.

Describing a hunt for a lion wounded by an amateur hunter somewhere near Maun, Bristow writes of lion claws: “These weapons of mass destruction are usually around four centimetres long, hard as carbon steel and sharp as razors. They can do a large amount of harm to a soft-skinned body.

“Then come the fangs…”

His first chapter about lions and lion men segues into the story of Harry Wolhuter, Southern Africa’s first game ranger. If you’ve been to Skukuza rest camp’s library-museum in the Kruger Park, you will have seen the skin of the lion that attacked him, and the knife he used to kill it while he was being dragged off for supper.

It is an extraordinary story of derring-do.

But the book is not all about lions.

There’s a chapter on the Cradle of Humankind, a camping trip that Bristow went on as a young man that went awry, a chapter on the sad story of Krotoa who became Mevrou Eva van Meerhoff, another on the extraordinary history of Mapungubwe, and many besides. This is a treasure of a book.

Raising the Bar – The making of a judge, by Jeremy Pickering (Staging Post)

Jeremy Pickering figures he’s the only SA judge ever to have worked as a clown. He may also have been the only clown ever to have become a judge.

The temporary career took place while he was on a gap year in the UK, where to start with he had to bed down in the elephant trailer. He says they were pretty rustig.

He grew up on a dairy farm in the Eastern Cape, studied law at Stellenbosch University, took his gap year – he also worked on a farm as an assistant pig man – before returning to SA where he became a prosecutor in Grahamstown (now Makhandla), an advocate in Mthatha, and director of the Legal Resources Centre in the Eastern Cape before becoming a judge of the Eastern Cape Division of the High Court. He retired in 2019.

He is obviously a clever, serious and erudite man, but he is also extremely funny and his book is a delight.

Or as retired Constitutional Court Judge Edwin Cameron writes: “It is a delightful memoir – entertaining, richly populated and wittily written. I have read it with amusement and enjoyment.”

As for me, I was laughing out loud.

Unbroken Chains – A 5 000-year history of African Enslavement, by Martin Plaut (Hurst & Company, London)

Now things get a touch more serious.

Martin Plaut would seem to know what he’s talking about. He was the BBC World Service’s Africa Editor, and has published extensively on African affairs. He has been an adviser to the UK Foreign Office and the US State Department, and is a senior researcher at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies.

But he started off by growing up in Cape Town, and studying law at UCT. After 1976 he left for exile in Britain, and London has been his home since.

Plaut wrote the biography of Dr Abdullah Abdurahman, the first black South African to win an election in the country, becoming a Cape Town city councillor from 1904 until his death in 1940.

Plaut wrtes: “Dr Abdurahman was the grandson of a slave, probably brought from Bengal. It troubled me that I knew so little about the slave trade across the Indian Ocean, which has been swamped by the Trans-Atlantic narrative, and so I decided to look at the subject in more detail.”

He writes of the slaves of the vast Sokoto Caliphate; the fate of the Oromo slaves from Ethiopia, captured and forced to march for weeks and months until they were sold in Arabia; and the men and woman of Irish villages captured and taken to North Africa as slaves.

“Each is a fragment of the African story of enslavement that has not yet concluded. Slavery continues to this day, with refugees trapped in Libya’s officially sanctioned detention centres still being sold to the highest bidder.”

This will be a tough read, but it looks seriously interesting.

Bosadi, by Kopano Matlwa (Jacana)

This is November’s only novel, and it opens dramatically: “I killed him. I sliced his neck open early on Christmas morning, while he slept with that pathetic look on his face.”

Matlakala was given the knife by one Rakgadi, who advises Matlakala to take it everywhere she goes. “It cuts like a hot knife to butter.”

And this proves to be the case. Matlakala says: “I was surprised at how easily the tissues split, did not resist being separated.”

Then there is Aunty, a Zimbabwean domestic worker, who watches as her employer’s marriage crumbles.

The two women, both lost and sad, develop a sort of sisterhood.

The cover tells us this story in told in alternating voices, and says: “Bosadi is a devastating exploration of gender, grief, immigration, violence and the impossible expectations that swallow women whole.”

It is written by the author who won the 2006/2007 European Award for her first novel Coconut.It was followed by Spilt Milk and then Period Pain, which was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Fiction Prize.

Matlwa is a public health physician living in Johannesburg.

A Moon will Rise from the Darkness – Reports on Israel’s genocide in Palestine, by Francesca Albanese; ed by Mandy Turner and Lex Takkenberg (Pluto Press)

Francesca Albanese is the UN special rapporteur on human rights in Palestine and has been documenting Israel’s actions in Palestine and Gaza. She recently – and controversially – visited South Africa.

In her introduction, she writes her first challenging encounter with the concept of genocide in Palestine came in 2023 – I gather before the Hamas attacks – when an Israeli holocaust survivor asked her why she was not investigating the genocide of the Palestinian people. She says she instinctively resisted the term, thinking instead of Nazi-occupied Europe, Rwanda and Bosnia. But she came to understand genocide is not committed by method, but by intent.

“This realisation, immense and unsettling, revealed the false premise that a state born from genocide could not commit genocide itself. History demonstrates the opposite: unhealed trauma can inflict further wounds.”

Apart from a foreword by former special rapporteurs on Palestine: Richard Falk, John Dugard and Michael Lynk, there are three chapters: Anatomy of a Genocide; Genocide as Colonial Erasure; and  From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide.

This will clearly not be a summer holiday read, but I suspect it is a profoundly important book.

All sale proceeds will go to UNRWA, the UN agency that supports Palestinian refugees.

These are among the books that landed on my desk in October. The Killing Stones by Ann Cleeves is among Exclusive Books’s top reads for October. Some of these books will be reviewed in full later. – Vivien Horler

Hope Arising – The story of SA’s Joule electric vehicle, and why it still matters, by Gerhard Swart (Quickfox)

Some years ago a neighbour had a sticker on the rear window of his bakkie reading: “I’d rather be driving a Joule.”

What’s a Joule, I wanted to know. It was an SA-developed electric car, he told me. He worked for the company.

It showed fantastic potential and promise, and yet in 2012 the project was halted.

Author and engineer Gerhard Swart was a co-founder of the project and lead engineer. In his career he contributed to the development of the Rooivalk attack helicopter and was the systems engineer behind the Southern African Large Telescope SALT.

In this book he describes the struggles, the innovations, the triumphs and the setbacks that led to the development and then the abandonment of the Joule project.

Of the book, Professor Wikus van Niekerk, dean of engineering at Stellenbosch University, says: “It’s a compelling and honest read that reveals the highs and lows of one of SA’s most daring engineering ventures. More than that, it’s a powerful reminder of what SA-trained engineers are capable of when given the chance.”

Fifteen Colonial Thefts – A guide to looted African heritage in museums, edited by Sela K Adjei and Yann LeGall (Pluto Press)

The Elgin Marbles, the Benin Bronzes – and thousands more artefacts were looted, stolen and sold to colonial powers. In many cases they are still displayed in the museums of Europe and the United States.

This volume is a collection of essays on 15 items that explore the history of colonial violence in Africa, all looted at the height of the imperial era and brought to first world museums. In most cases – although not all: the return of the remains of Saartjie Baartman from France being an example – there is stern resistance to their repatriation.

And yet usually the items have deep spiritual and cultural significance in their native lands.

One of the essays is a powerful piece by Nii Kwate Owoo from Ghana’s Gold Coast who went to London in the 1960s to study film.. A visit to the Africa section of the British Museum gave him an idea of the subject of his graduation film.

The Africa section was housed in “a huge room, filled with glass vitrines from the ground to the ceiling. I was amazed, because for the first time in my life I realised the amount of material that had been taken away, including exceptional pieces of Asante regalia… I had never seen these things before; some of them were very sacred cultural assets, works of art created by our ancestors that had only been meant for religious veneration in sacred shrines, not for public exhibition.”

He made his film, You Hide Me, in 1970, which resurfaced in 2020 after his son, living in the US shortly after the murder of George Floyd, persuaded his dad to let it be shown at the BlackStar Film Festival in Philadelphia. Later it won best short documentary at the 2020 Paris Short Film Festival.

The screening of the film has sparked interest in Ghana in the potential return of Asante artefacts to the country. Nii Owoo now wants his film “decolonised from the English language” so that it can be shown in Ghanaian languages to spark debates on the issue, and then in versions “in Swahili, Yoruba, Igbo, isiZulu, IsiXhosa… This is my vision for the future”.

The Killing Stones – The return of Jimmy Perez, by Anne Cleeves (Macmillan)

Yay, a new Jimmy Perez novel!

If you haven’t read Jimmy Perez detective fiction before, you’re in for a treat. Or you might know that if you’ve seen the TV series Shetland.

Cleeves is prolific, what with her Shetland series, her Vera series and her newer Two Rivers series, set in Devon. The Vera and Shetland series are my favourites.

Not sure if I’ve missed something, but Jimmy Perez is now living with Willow, their four-year-old son and another baby on the way, in the Orkneys – an island archipelago a bit closer to the Scottish mainland than the Shetlands.

It’s December and the weather is wild. Archie Stout is out in it, shouting, knowing his words can’t be heard above the wind. He’s wet and windblown, and looking forward to joining his mates in the Pierowall Hotel bar – he’s already an hour late.

Archie is worried about a problem, and resolves to discuss it with Perez. And then a familiar figure emerges out of the gloom, swathed in a waterproof. “Ah,” Archie says. “So it’s you.”

Hours later Archie’s body is found, bludgeoned to death with a Neolithic stone bearing ancient inscriptions. The local community is shocked.

But fear not: Jimmy Perez is on the case.

Letters from Elena, by Anne Hamilton (Legend Press)

As children in an English village, April and Elena are inseparable. One day, they vow, when they are grown up, they will travel together to Cyprus, the island where Elena’s family is from.

But long before that, in 1974, Elena and her family disappear. apparently back to the now war-torn island. April is devastated.

Elena was good at writing, but never writes her friend a letter.

Except that it turns out she did write – letters to April and her former classmates and posted to their teacher.

For reasons which I haven’t discovered yet, the teacher passes them on only years later at a tough time in April’s life, when both her parents have just died and she and her long-term boyfriend have split up.

And suddenly April decides now is the time to visit Cyprus, and perhaps find out what happened to Elena.

She falls in with a group of hospitable Greeks, and also meets Red, an Irishman with whom she feels an instant connection – but there are complications there.

And that’s as far as I’ve got, but I certainly plan to go on reading.

Healing the Mother Wound – A guide that will change your life, by Moshitadi Lehlomela (Tafelberg)

Moshitadi Lehlomela wrote a book called The Girl who Survived her Mother, which I have not read, but I understand describes a toxic childhood.

In her introduction to this, a self-help book, she says she was conceived when her older brother was a little older than a year.

“Pregnant again while still caring for an infant, her husband became more and more distant, her mother-in-law abusive, and poverty tightened its grip as she mourned the slow but imminent death of her dreams.”

Even as a foetus, Lehlomela says she could sense the chaos on the outside.

“So by the time I was earthside, I had already sucked my thumb thin and dry.” She continued this habit into adulthood.

(I too sucked my thumb, until I was 11, but the only blame I placed on my parents for this was that they never offered me – deeply unfashionable at the time – a dummy).

Her mother was wrathful, mercurial, depressed, physically and verbally abusive. “…and so by the age of six I began to self-protect by turning away from my mother, having few expectations of her and actively dissociating from my environment”.

Healing the Mother Wound is part sequel to her first book, part workbook. She has tables with tick boxes: “Were you abused in any of the ways below: Constant yelling? Constant rage: Hatred? Humiliation? Emotional incest? Scapegoating? Favouritism” and so on.

I don’t think I, thank God, need this book, but there are many who may.