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

Kruger Speaks – An intimate view of a magnificent wildlife park, by Helena Kriel & Don Pinnock (Struik Nature)

Kruger Speaks is a magnificent guide to the nearly 20 000 sqkm of wild land bordering both Zimbabwe and Mozambique and, arguably, South Africa’s greatest treasure.

It is designed as a meander through the park, starting at the Crocodile Bridge Gate in the south and ending at the Pafuri Gate in the remote north west near Crooks Corner.

In their introduction, the authors say the park is not so much a destination as a presence. And they have tried to get the park to speak, through its people as well as the animals and the general wildlife who live there.

The first of the three main themes is the human stories, told by the people who live in the work, work there and also those who visit.

Then there is the park’s astonishing diversity, from the antelopes described as the architects of the ecosystem to the Big Five and the humble dung beetle (one of the Earth’s greatest engineers, according to a ranger).

And the third element is the journey – “the slow, ruminative, absorbing experience of driving into Kruger and surrendering to its pace”. (In my experience, after a week in the park driving at a maximum of 50km/h, getting back on the national roads where the limit is100km/h or more is terrifying.)

The authors add that beneath all this is the deep contradiction – the park is “both wild and wounded”. The real terrain, they say, is “human – hunger, corruption, courage, trauma. And tracker dogs…”

But their central theme is reverence, and they sat that what stands out is not despair but devotion.

The photography is magnificent and the volume is both the epitome of the show-off coffee table book and a glorious guide to the park’s back story.

A Political Memoir, by Roelf Meyer, as told to Anneliese Burgess (Tafelberg)

Gone fishing. That was the story of how Cyril Ramaphosa and Roelf Meyer forged the unlikely relationship that led to the Codesa negotiations getting over the almost insuperable difficulties that resulted in South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994.

And the relationship evidently continues, because President Ramaphosa has now entrusted Meyer – as South Africa’s ambassador to the US – with the tricky task of restoring our relationship with the unreliable and unpredictable Trump administration.

Meyer was born in 1947 in the small town of Kareedouw, near Tsitsikamma, in the Eastern Cape, where his tiny family – parents and older brother – lived on a small subsistence farm. There was no running water and no electricity, but his mother had studied at a teachers’ training college in Stellenbosch and brought  a glimpse of a wider world to Roelf and his older brother Tobie.

But he grew up steeped in the Afrikaner world, being inducted into the Ruiterwacht – youth wing of the Broederbond – when he was 21 and a student at the University of the Orange Free State.

How extraordinary was his subsequent transformation. He credits coming to Cape Town as a law officer for a major Afrikaans investment company in 1972 as resulting in “the first significant crack in his ideological armour”.

By September 1989, as deputy minister for Constitutional Development and National Education, he threatened to quit his position if there were “no signs of progress in negotiations for constitutional reform during the next two years”, according to The Star.

And the rest, as we know, is history.

Since democracy, Meyer has talked peace and negotiation in places as far afield as Northern Ireland, Rwanda and Kosovo.

This memoir looks readable and engaging, and describes a pivotal period in our history.

Our Noble Selves, by Kate Atkinson (Doubleday)

In 1948, three years after the end of World War 2 in Europe, the then Princess Elizabeth made a speech at the launch of the Festival of Britain committee. She said it was hoped the festival, to take place in 1951, “may prove to be not simply an end in itself, but a beginning of many good things”.

Shortly after returning from the East at the end of the war, former Japanese internee Harry Flynn needs to recuperate both physically and mentally.

He is working for a small printing works in Lonson when Gerald Barry, his old boss at the News Chronicle, offers him a job. Barry is part of the Festival Committee, and they plan to show off a recovering Britain on the south bank of the Thames. It’s all to be a beacon for change, a tonic for the nation.

And they’re going to need people who can read.

There is a call for a festival anthology of poems, with prize money, and the organisers expect thousands of entries. There will be top literary judges, but someone first has to go through the “mountains of slush”.

“You want me to read hundreds of bad poems?”

“Yes.”

“All right.”

“You will? Excellent!”

Having read the first couple of chapters, I think this novel looks a delight, reminding me slightly of that brilliant British TV series 2012, set just before the London Olympics and starring Ricky Gervais.

Like the 2012 Olympics, the Festival of Britain is a big project, and things will definitely go wrong.

*This novel is one of Exclusive Books’s top reads for October.

Agency – A memoir of remarkable things, by Ashley Brownlee (Southern Right Publishers)

In an author’s note at the beginning of this engaging autobiography, Ashley Brownlee tells us his book is not a tale of epic adventure – “this is something smaller, shared between us, around a campfire, with nothing but a gazillion burning suns bearing witness from the firmament… the crackling flames of an everyday life…”

Although evidently not that everyday. Brownlee was adopted, after being born at St Joseph’s Sanatorium – now Vincent Pallotti Hospital – and was immediately whisked away from his unmarried mother by righteous nuns.

I remember being told, during a creative writing course, to people my stories with characters who were a little bit odd. I’m not sure if Brownlee was given this advice or just was surrounded by weirdos, but there are certainly some odd people here.

His father had a pegleg, having lost it after an injury during a cricket match, while his mother, besotted by the theatre, never cooked and built several houses without kitchens.

Then there were his godparents, one of whom was the pilot of a helicopter that crashed flying passengers from a Union Castle ship to Cape Town harbour. A young Brownlee, his sister and mother were waiting at the helicopter terminal for a flip. Brownlee says he never saw the actual impact of the aircraft hitting the breakwater, as this mother considerately turned her children away in the nick of time.

His godmother lost a pair of twin sons. “The exact details escape me, but I recall the episode involved a game of hide-and-seek and a collapsing bed”.

The final godfather, a man known as Gay Alan, made a serious miscalculation when one weekend, his longtime lover away, suggested sex with the gardener. “And so it was that Gay Alan was beheaded with a spade and carried, in a flokati rug… to the bottom of the garden where he was buried among the azaleas”.

Young Brownlee became convinced “that adults in the real world, especially those charged with one’s spirituality, were off-the-charts reckless and not to be trusted”.

There is more but you get the idea. This narrative is not necessarily comfortable, but it is always readable and often hilarious.

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

Cape Peninsula Coastal Gardening: A little bit of wild, by Tara Dalton (Published by Tara Dalton)

I live on the edge of Zandvlei, about 4km from Muizenberg beach in Cape Town.

There are pretty views, but we get howling south-easters in summer (and spring and autumn and winter, judging by this year), and the wind is often salt-laden, withering tender shoots. The stuff laughingly referred to as soil is sand.

My sister-in-law, however, lives in Clifton, where in winter her garden faces the full force of Atlantic storms and winds.

Greenery covers what were once bare dunes at Clovelly beach

In short, the coast of the Cape Peninsula is a hostile environment for a keen gardener. I am not a keen gardener, but I do like my garden to look half-way decent.

Which is why I pounced on this fabulous book.

Tara Dalton, who studied history and law at Oxford, retrained as a garden designer and horticulturalist in the UK. She has also gardened in Australia and Cape Town, and understands hostile environments.

While creating an attractive garden is part of Dalton’s philosophy, there is much more. One concern is biodiversity loss caused by factors including urban and rural development. And this affects other species along the food chain, including invertebrates and birds that are vital for pollination.

Detail of the spring flowers on the Clovelly dunes

“When one aspect of the ecological chain is affected, there is a knock-on effect that leads to loss of species in both the plant and animal kingdoms.”

In 2013 the SA National Biodiversity Institute noted that at least 13 plant species that used to occur in greater Cape Town had been declared “extinct in the wild”.

What with urban development, a lack of awareness, invasive species, too many fires and, of course, global climate change, “we could lose not only individual species but entire ecosystems that have evolved over millennia”.

This beautifully illustrated volume is an important contribution to helping return nature to urban settings.

Dalton says in her preface she has focused on the Cape Peninsula as it is home to one of the most diverse – yet one of the most threatened – plant diversities in the world. Our peninsula, covering just 470km², has more than 2 500 indigenous flowering plant species, and more than 160 of them are endemic to this area, meaning they grow naturally nowhere else in the world.

Compare this to the entire British Isles, covering more than 250 000km², which has fewer than 1 500 indigenous plant species.

So this book is a celebration as well as a guide for peninsula gardeners.

It focuses on indigenous plants found in the coastal lowlands of the peninsula rather than those high in the mountains.

Dalton points out that along our coastline there are bands of soil – mainly acid and sandy, or alkaline and sandy – which determine which plants will grow well. The bands are fynbos, dunes, Cape Flats dune strandveld and seasonal wetlands.

Each plant entry is identified by which ecosystem it prefers, its eventual height, and whether it wants sun, shade or a mixture of the two. Then follows a brief description of the plant, and how to propagate it.

Occasionally individual plants are celebrated in a longer section, such as the Cape Sweetpea/ Okie Bean (Dipogan lignosus) a climbing perennial with lots of pink to purple flowers from August to January.

Dalton writes: “For the foodie or cook … the deciding factor is that its flowers and young pods are absolutely delicious raw in salads, and steaming the pods make for a truly worthwhile local vegetable…”.

It is tolerant of salt air, coastal winds, semi-shade and poor soils, is a soil enricher as a legume, and is pretty – all of which means “it really does deserve a place in coastal gardens”.

Prize-winning landscape designer Leon Kluge says in a foreword: “If this book inspires you to plant one indigenous species, to remove one inappropriate exotic, or to see your garden as part of a larger living system, then it has already done important work.”

PS: The other day, for the first time in a while, I went for a walk on Clovelly beach near Fish Hoek. There the City of Cape Town has been securing the dunes by planting a variety of suitable dune-loving plants, surrounding small areas with protective shade cloth.

I was stunned by the beauty and success of the project. Once barren and shifting dunes are covered in green foliage and spring flowers. Gardens on and near the beach can clearly be a success, if you have some idea of what you’re doing – and Tara Dalton’s terrific book will help you there.

The Burfee Seller’s Daughters, by Shafinaaz Hassim (Kwela Books)

To the uninitiated, like me, burfee is an Indian sweet, “a snowy confectionary that made addics of anyone who encountered the sweet experience”. And it was a recipe for burfee, the pinnacle of the sweet treats made by Alibhai Mithaiwala, that he brought to South Africa from India and became the foundation of his modest store in Fordsburg, Johannesburg, the beginning of the family fortune.

The business was expanded by Osman, Alibhai’s son, to the extent the family now live comfortably in Sandton. And it is still going, carried on by the enthusiasm of Osman’s elder daughter, Tzarina, who has many ideas for the expansion of The House of Burfee.

The younger sister, Jaynab, has done what Tzarina hasn’t, and has secured a husband, but has produced no children yet, a fact the sisters’ mother never tires of pointing out.

Having Tzarina take over the business reins is a break with tradition, but Osman has no sons and, besides, can recognise his daughter’s expertise and zeal.

And now a former boyfriend of Tzarina’s, the one who broke her heart as a student 10 years ago, has set up a business meeting with her. He is based in Dubai where he has a client who wants to open a franchised branch of House of Burfee.

This is exciting, but Tzarina is playing it cool. She will consult her father, and do the due diligence. More importantly, she thinks, she needs to make sure her past isn’t on a collision course with her future.

And something is definitely brewing, because the cover blurb tells us that a family secret is about to surface which will test Osman’s relationship with his daughters.

Author Shafinaaz Hassim is an award-winning writer and sociologist who has written several novels as well as other publications. In 2014 she was listed by Unesco as one of the top 39 writers in sub-Saharan authors under 40. She divides her time between Polokwane and Durban.

Curro – The art of creating true wealth, by Chris van der Merwe, with Elmari Rautenbach (Tafelberg/ Jonathan Ball Publishers)

Dr Chris van der Merwe is, with colleagues, the founder of the Curro schools and Stadio Holdings, a JSE-listed higher education company. And he admits he is “what you might call a wealthy man”. But he adds true wealth is about much more than just money.

He also points out that in a world fascinated by instant success, it has taken him almost 35 years to accumulate what he has today.

When he started Curro, he says in his foreword, he had never read a book like the one he has written. “If I had read one, I would have stressed less and been better prepared for a wider range of situations.”

He adds that the purpose of the book is to get young entrepreneurs “to understand my mindset and my experiences of both the highs and the lows”.

The book is divided into two parts – first his life story and second his definition of true wealth and, based on personal experience, his advice on how to achieve it.

He describes how, in October 2016, he was drinking his morning coffee when the CEO of the largest shareholder in Curro Holdings rang him.

“Congratulations on Curro’s market value this morning. A market cap of R20billion – that’s remarkable.”

Van der Merwe’s coffee cup froze in his hand. He mused: “What, R20billion? But not so long ago I was a primary school teacher.”

Van der Merwe’s father died when he was three, and his mother brought his sister and him up in Goodwood,  Cape Town, on a pension of R94 a month.

As Malcolm Gladwell wrote in The Tipping Point, every successful person needs a mentor and 10 000 hours of practice. Van der Merwe’s first mentor was his matric history teacher who, he says, altered the direction of his life. He taught young Christie the importance of planning every hour of the day, of a step-by-step approach to work and the importance of looking back on your completed steps, and reminding him of the difficulties he had dealt with and what he had achieved.

Then there were the 10 000 hours of teaching, founding a small private school, and solving the myriad problems that came with all that.

This looks like a useful guide to entrepreneurship and success in accumulating wealth, of both financial and personal value, and it is instructive that the writer is not some amazing whiz kid who started life waving a silver spoon but a humble primary school teacher. There is always hope.