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”.

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.”