A woman’s fight for the life she deserves – and the toll it takes

Review: Vivien Horler

Restless Dolly Maunder, by Kate Grenville (Canongate)

Shortly before she dies, around the mid-1950s, Dolly Maunder looks back on her life.

Her generation was the hinge, she thinks: when she was born in the early 1880s the door of female aspiration had been shut tight. Then it began to creak open. “My generation was the hinge that it had to be forced around on, one surface grinding over another. No wonder it was painful.”

This is an Australian historical novel by an acclaimed author, and it was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2024. Kate Grenville has won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and been shortlisted for both the Booker Prize and the Miles Franklin Literary Award (named after the author of the brilliant book, film and now TV series My Brilliant Career).

She has written more than 10 novels and a handful of non-fiction books. As far as I can recall, this is the first of her novels I have read, and I loved it. Continue reading →

Bedside Table books from August

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These are among the books that landed on my desk in August 2026. Some will be reviewed in full later – Vivien Horler

Days of Miracle and Wonder – Paul Simon and the trials and triumphs of Graceland, by Ashley Kahn (White Rabbit/Jonathan Ball)

It is 40 years since Paul Simon and Ladysmith Black Mambazo, along with other artists, produced Graceland, that game-changing album that gave Simon’s post-Simon & Garfunkel career, along with that of Ladysmith Black Mambazo, a new lease of life, won a slew of Grammys and sold millions of records.

South Africa in 1985 was a very different place from today. It was a tumultuous year, at the height of the international cultural boycott targeting the country’s oppressive apartheid legislation. Yet potentially risking his superstar reputation, Simon went to Johannesburg to record with SA musicians.

And it all started with a bootleg cassette tape, recorded in Joburg, which somehow reached Simon and sparked his interest. The tape was called Gumboots: Accordion Jive Hits, Volume II. Simon wrote it had been lent to him by a friend, and “sounded vaguely like ‘50s rock’n’roll out of the Atlantic Records school of simple three-chord pop hits… It was very up, very happy music – familiar and foreign-sounding at the same time”.

In 1986, Simon was asked about the state of music, and responded that the selling process seemed more important than the creative process, “and music becomes diluted again with imitators”. A lot of the different styles of music seemed to be popular, but Simon didn’t find most of them “very interesting”.

It was the fringes that were interesting, he told Musician magazine. And Gumboots was clearly part of the fringe.

But Simon was sailing into major political controversy, of which Johnny Clegg and Sipho Mchunu’s Juluka had had a foretaste when they performed in Europe.

This looks like a great history of a ground-breaking musical movement at a time when South Africa’s tectonic plates were finally beginning to shift.

The Cauldron – The making of the modern Middle East 1900-2026, by Simon Sebag Montefiore (Weidenfeld & Nicolson/Jonathan Ball)

Since Hamas’s murderous attack on people in southern Israel in October 2023 and Israel’s wildly disproportionate response, I have been looking for some relatively balanced description of what led to the horror.

I first read A Very Short History of the Israel-Palestine Conflict by Ilan Pappe, which I found interesting, informative and nuanced.

Then there was A Short History of the Gaza Strip, by Anne Irfan, which I couldn’t review because the description of the unending persecution by the Israeli authorities of Palestinians in general and the people of Gaza in particular was just too ghastly to write about with any sense of balance.

It seemed to me the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 was truly, as Palestinians say, a nakba – a catastrophe – not just for the Middle East but, as we are finding out daily, to our current world.

Simon Sebag Montefiore’s 400-page tome (that’s not counting the maps, the end notes and the index) clearly gives a broader view, and covers a much wider geographical spread, from Egypt, Sudan and the Ottoman Empire (Turkiye) to Iran, Iraq, Israel of course, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman and the UAE.

In his introduction he writes that the Middle East is “the source of the three ‘Abrahamic religions’, the prize of empires, the bridge of continents, the path of armies, the trigger of conflicts, the well of radicalism, the font of resistance, the arena of mega powers, the cockpit of rising states, the battlefield of different versions of Islam, intra-Arab rivalries, Persian-Arab and Judo-Islamic hostilities and the laboratory of 21^st century weaponry.

“It is also the kingdom of poetry, the gateway of trade, the souk of art, the entrepot of cosmopolitanism, the reservoirs of oil, the cynosure of media, the passion-play of modern morality – and very much the epicentre of our tumultuous, rushing, interconnected world.”

He says the events of the past 30 years, even the past 80 years, are incomprehensible “without knowing what happened in the Middle East at the start of the 20^th century…”

He adds: “This region looms larger in the Western consciousness than any other, its history over the last century is more debated and contested than anywhere else, yet conversely less understood.

“Its history is fascinating, complicated, paradoxical, diverse and interwoven – and surprisingly little known. Yet is essential to know if we are to understand what is happening now, how we got here, and what will come next.”

So could this book be the definitive explanation of where we are now?

The Miseducation of South Africa – Busting myths about our biggest debates, by Dan Corder (Jonathan Ball Publishers)

I am an elderly retired journalist who gets my news from mainstream, progressive media. Dan Corder is a broadcaster, 32 years old, and clearly well informed, a man who worries about where millions of young people are getting their information from.

What I’m saying here is, I’m not this book’s target market. I was reading chapter one and thinking, yeah, yeah, we know all this stuff. Tell me something I don’t know.

But Miseducation isn’t aimed at me. It’s aimed at – probably mostly young – people who get their information from social media, and who may not have the history or the experience to say, hang on, this can’t be right.

Most South Africans don’t know enough about their own country, and this, says Corder, is a quiet crisis that is hammering us all.

“It is stifling empathy and driving us away from each other into insulated, lonely, small lives. This suffocating ignorance allows powerful elites to exploit us. It allows politicians to lie and mislead people into believing half-truths and pure untruths. They find it is easy to sell myths to get votes and evade accountability.”

He adds that the internet is increasingly a place where people create fakes and trick people into believing lies. And the education system has failed us.

If he were president for a day, Corder would make history a compulsory subject and reorganise the curriculum. Since that isn’t going to happen, he has written this book to explain where we are and what is going on.

It’s a great aim, a wonderful ambition. But will the people who get their misinformation from X and other social media pick up this book and read it?

The Sound of Ice, by Megan Choritz (Ride or Die/ Melinda Ferguson Books)

The next major wars will be over water, say the pundits, although right now the Middle East seems more likely. But this is a novel, set not far in the future, about water, its scarcity, what people are doing to protect it – and the eruption of the water wars.

The fountains in the parks are dry. Once a fancy fountain played music on special occasions, but now the empty pool is used as a skate park. Meanwhile a vast AI server on the edge of town is using huge amounts of electricity and water to keep it running. People have to buy their water from tanks and supermarkets.

With society breaking down, desperate measures are needed. Harvesting water from icebergs is cheaper than desalination plants.

Far away, near one of the frozen poles, 167 small boats have formed a ring around an iceberg to protect it. On board each boat is a mother and a daughter. Once a month they receive new supplies. For the rest they catch fish, and watch the iceberg.

Then one day the iceberg is attacked, and the water wars begin.

The blurb on the cover tells us this book “is a fierce act of imagination about trafficked bodies and stolen futures, female fury, tenderness, exile and the cost of trying to stay human when everything has turned monstrous”.

Looks intriguing.

Phantom Pass – A crime thriller by Andre M Louw (Catalyst Press)

Just after 9pm a diner leaving a restaurant near the Knysna Heads spots a small rowing boat floating in the lagoon. There seems to be an arm dangling over the side. The diner calls it in.

A pair of cops is sent out and in the boat they find a body, one that has been grotesquely mutilated. It emerges the body is that of an eminent retired advocate, a senior counsel who served a couple of stints as an acting judge in the Supreme Court.

Top Southern Cape cop Gavin Whitall of the serious crimes unit in George engages the help of a rookie detective based in George, Captain Josh Holland. Holland has had legal experience, and Whitall wants him on the team.

They explore a pretty seedy empire of gangs and drugs, with clues stretching back into the ANC’s armed struggle in the 1980s. Meanwhile the bodies are piling up.

This is a tale of greed, violence and revenge, and is apparently merely the first volume in a “duology”, according to author Andre Louw.

South Africa, then and now, from a maverick Afrikaner’s perspective

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Review: Vivien Horler

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

In 1976, just after the eruption of the Soweto uprising and the killing of scores of pupils by the police on June 16, the eminent academic Franklin Sonn said: “Today it is over for apartheid and the National Party… It’s just a matter of time.”

Fourteen turbulent years later, President FW de Klerk stood up in Parliament, unbanned the liberation movements and announced the release of Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners. It was all over bar the shouting (although there was quite a lot of shouting).

Pondering those 14 years, Max du Preez, journalist, editor, Afrikaner iconoclast and a man with a great sense of humour, writes in this sort-of-memoir: “How did it come about that the National Party government, a self-declared champion of Western civilisation and Christianity, descended into the murky depths of death squads, assassination, poisoning and kidnapping? This is how I understand it. After the 1976 Soweto Uprising, the white government realised that apartheid as an ideology had failed utterly. They understood that it was ‘the end of normal’.” Continue reading →

An Irish perspective – who are the true owners of the land?

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Review: Vivien Horler

Land – A novel, by Maggie O’Farrell (Tinder Press)

Maggie O’Farrell’s historical novel Hamnet has been on our big screens lately, and a great movie – and book – it was too. But I enjoyed Land even more.

Perhaps it is because in this novel she is unconstrained by the historical facts of the life of Shakespeare’s family. Or maybe it is a return to her Irish roots – in any case Land is a great saga of family and place.

It is 1865, and Tomas is a surveyor and draughtsman, mapping Ireland for the redcoats. He grew up in a workhouse, seized chances offered to him, and became a gifted draughtsman.

He has no illusions as to why the redcoats need him: while there are plenty in England who have his skills and more, there are few who have all that plus his local knowledge, who can speak to the people in their own language. Continue reading →

A story of the humble sponge, and how it shaped communities

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Review: Vivien Horler

On the Sponge Islands – Loss and restoration in the Aegean, by Julia Martin (Jonathan Ball Publishers)

Sponges – everyday utilitarian objects of no great interest or value. I have two in the kitchen, for dish-washing and mopping up spills, and another in the bathroom.

Yet natural sponges, harvested from the deep, once made many people extraordinarily rich (think of the analogy of ostrich plumes for the Oudtshoorn feather barons). Even today they can sell for around 30 euros (about R550).

In a prologue to this travel memoir, Cape Town-based writer Julia Martin refers to sponges as “the meekest of animals who live and reproduce without muscles, heart, brain or nervous system”, always retaining their defining quality: porosity.

Martin is charmed: “All day and all night, the ocean flows through, unhindered. Sponges are made of sea, of everything.” Continue reading →

How newspapers came about – and why they’re dying

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Review: Archie Henderson

Empire of Ink: The printers, rogues, and radicals who invented the American newspaper, by Alex Wright (Basic Books)

Before there was the internet, there was the US Postal Service – the original network where cut-and-paste spread the news long before copy-and-paste ever did.

Alex Wright traces the arc of American newspapers from the 1790s, just after independence, to the late 19th century, when the press swelled to an annual US newspaper circulation totalling 3.6 billion before its slow decline at the most recent turn of a century.

But let’s not go there yet – the history along the way is far too rich to rush. Continue reading →

SA readers will recognise so much in this troubled story

Bedside Table books for July 2026

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

The Glass Island, by Patricia Schonstein (African Sun Press)

The blurb from the publisher which accompanied this novel tells us Patricia Schonstein is a novelist, poet and curator of anthologies. “Her fiction spans magical realism, speculative fiction, meta-fiction and narrative fiction, celebrated for its lyrical prose and moral urgency.”

That gives you some idea of the content of her eighth novel, The Glass Island, which is set in a time of apocalypse and war, and on an island reminiscent of Venice, which is slowly sinking into the sea.

It begins in Cape Town, at a lunch after which the narrator goes for a walk down Long Street, her (I’m assuming it’s a her) stamping ground, and along which she bumps into various real and surreal characters, some of whom are wearing matador masks.

She ends up at the old Space Theatre, where a ticket with her name on it is waiting at the door, along with an outfit, the same as that worn by Rembrandt’s The Polish Rider. The music induces a sense of vertigo, and suddenly the narrator finds herself in her ancestral home, the sinking Golden City, and the Glass Island that lies beyond the lagoon.

People are fleeing, evacuating, ahead of a frightening invading army of Fascists led by Putin’s army and thousands of North Koreans. But our narrator is going the other way

There is a dreamlike feel to all this. She ends up in a bar, where the other patrons include some Long Street characters, a soldier in the uniform of the Rhodesian Light Infantry, and the (real-life) poet Joan Hambidge, who is celebrating the late and (real life) poet Stephen Watson.

She asks Hambidge whether, seeing as all wars end in some sort of negotiated peace or defeat, whether it would make sense to capitulate right at the beginning and skip all the death and destruction.

Hambidge thinks this is a pathetic question. What with tanks and drones, a bare-chested madman on a horse, and a border that is “hot and raging”, would the other side even notice a white flag? Besides, war is business. People get rich.

The narrator asks the Rhodesian soldier if he thinks poetry could stop war. He replies:

“Stop war with poetry? Oh fuck! Should we have waved Tennyson under their noses? Said: Okay you fuckers! Just put those AKs down a wee moment while I read you this… these few rhyming couplets. Give me a break, lady. Go away for Chrissake.”

I haven’t read much beyond this, but it’s weird, shimmering, full of sumptuous costumes, theatrical backdrops, paintings, poetry (some Schonstein’s own) and references to war, in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan and Syria. It’s very strange but oddly compelling.

Held: Portrait of the Black Family – a memoir, by Lulama Mali (Tafelberg)

Lulama Tali writes beautifully. Read these opening lines: “I was born into the arms of those who knew the weight of goodbye. It was a house where grief drifted alongside jazz, curling through the rooms like incense… Love lived there too, worn but abundant…”

As a child Mali believed her mother had been killed in a terrible accident. But this was not true. She was brought up by her grandma, who came from Wittebome near Plumstead, and her grandpa, from Elsies River, from where they were later moved to Gugulethu.

But it was a complicated family, mined by often bitter memories. The blurb tells us this memoir looks at memory, silence and inheritance, and asks: “What happens when the truths that bind us finally come undone?”

The Only Cure – Freud and the neuroscience of mental healing, by Mark Solms (Weidenfeld & Nicolson/ Jonathan Ball)

When I hear the name Solms I think of the wonderful (but sometimes troubled) wine estate Solms Delta in the Drakenstein Valley. But of course it is named after its proprietor, the UCT neuropsychologist and psychoanalyst Mark Solms, said to be the world’s greatest living authority on Freud and the descendant of a German viticultural family with roots in the Rheinhessen area.

In his introduction to this book, Solms writes that in the 1960s more than 50% of all American psychiatrists were psychoanalysts – the talking cure, think of the psychoanalyst’s couch – while today that percentage has dwindled to single figures.

But as those numbers fell away, treatment saw the rise of “biological psychiatry”, based on the inference that mental suffering should be treated physically, because its root causes are found within the brain, not in long-buried traumatic experiences.

Freud and his methods fell out of favour in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries, but Solms argues that his career, clinical experience and research have shown him “we need [Freud] today more than ever”.

He says there is now a mountain of evidence that mainstream psychotherapies derived from psychoanalysis are “astoundingly effective” and get to the root of the problem.

“The talking cure is a cure – and still the only real one we have in psychotherapy.”

South African Birds by Name – Origins and meanings, by Eddie Germiquet (Struik Nature)

This beautiful book is the result of years of work by a retired theologian who became interested in birds at the age of 11. He tried to learn the birds’ scientific names – usually in Latin or Greek – without a clue as to what they meant.

With a book like this to hand, that ignorance can be overcome.

Eddie Germiquet says in producing this book on how South African birds (including those of the Prince Edward Islands) got their names, he has included myths, beliefs of the day, stories about certain birds, as well as places and people.

Paging through this guide – illustrated with Germiquet’s own paintings – one comes across some delightful eccentricities. For example, the neddicky, or more formally, Cisticola fulvicapilla, which means tawny-capped shrub-dwelling bird (from cisti/cola: Greek/Latin kisthos = shrub + cola = one who inhabits) and (fulvi/capilla (Latin fulvus = tawny + capilla = head hair or capped).

But what is more interesting is where the common name neddicky comes from. According to Germiquet, Dutch farmers in the Eastern Cape adopted the isiZulu and isiXhosa name for the little bird, uncede. Then the farmers added the dimunitive -tje to form ncedetje, which became the Afrikaans ncedetjie. And this was then anglicised as neddicky.

To my delight I also came across Penduline-Tits, whose name appears to have everything to do with their hanging, purse-like nests and nothing at all to do with their non-existent mammaries.

The City is Mine – A novel, by Niq Mhlongo (Kwela Books)

This is, strictly speaking, not a new book – it was published in 2024 – but it’s new to me.

Mangi and his fiancée Aza have a tumultuous relationship. They have shared a house in Johannesburg’s Linden for eight years, for which Mangi pays the rent.

But one day, when cleaning the bedroom, Mangi comes across a document taped to the underside of a drawer. (Mangi is clearly an unusual man in that he cleans so thoroughly he checks the undersides of drawers.)

To his bewilderment and shock, the document is the title deed to the house, which turns out to be in Aza’s name. All this time, he has been paying rent to a fictitious property company which goes straight into Aza’s bank account.

He confronts her, but she is unrepentant. How does he expect her to be beautiful for him if she doesn’t have any money? And anyway, why should he live for free?

The relationship starts to unravel and Mangi ends up jobless and destitute on the streets of Jozi, trying to find ways to make money and survive.

There is some pretty explicit sex here.

The blurb tells us that this is “a bittersweet story of passion, desperation, camaraderie and seemingly impossible dreams”.

We all keep secrets, even – especially – from those we love

How a ‘weird’ fantasy is becoming a terrifying prophecy

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Review: Vivien Horler

Book of Lives – A memoir of sorts, by Margaret Atwood (Chatto & Windus)

It’s a mark of her literary fame that by far the biggest text on the cover is the author’s name, followed by the title and subtitle in much smaller type.

Margaret Atwood’s output has been prodigious – she has written more than 50 books of fiction, poetry and essays and won the Booker Prize twice – once for The Blind Assassin, and once shared it for The Testaments, the sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale.

She has been a cartoonist, illustrator, librettist, playwright and puppeteer. Wikipedia tells us she is also an inventor – she came up with the concept of the LongPen, described as “a remote robotic writing technology” device, helpful for book signings. She cooks, she knits, has done various crafts, has been a wife and long-term partner, a stepmother, mother and grandmother. Continue reading →

The Books Page

Book reviews and news

A woman’s fight for the life she deserves – and the toll it takes

Bedside Table books from August

South Africa, then and now, from a maverick Afrikaner’s perspective

An Irish perspective – who are the true owners of the land?

A story of the humble sponge, and how it shaped communities

How newspapers came about – and why they’re dying

SA readers will recognise so much in this troubled story

Bedside Table books for July 2026

We all keep secrets, even – especially – from those we love

How a ‘weird’ fantasy is becoming a terrifying prophecy