Review: Vivien Horler

The Messiah’s Dream Machine, by Jennifer Friedman (Tafelberg)

Jennifer Friedman has a way with words. So much so that I may never look at a frikkadel in the same way again.

The Messiah’s Dream Machine is a sequel to her well received Queen of the Free State, about a little Jewish girl growing up in Philippolis, the sleepy Afrikaans town where Laurens van der Post was born.

As far as one can gather there aren’t many Jewish farmers in the Free State, but her family had farms in the Philippolis area, now run by her cousins, and it is clear these spaces are deep in her heart.

This has not however prevented her from emigrating to Australia, where she has acquired her pilot’s licence, bought a Grumman Tiger aircraft and now “flies to the small outback towns and stations around Australia, often just for a lunch date and where the sun is shining”.

Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

The Salt Path, by Raynor Winn (Penguin)

Raynor and Moth Winn were in their 50s when they decided to walk. Their lives were falling apart and they didn’t know what to do.

So they started to walk, along south-west England’s famed South West Coast, setting out from Minehead in Somerset, and carrying on, across North Devon, round the Cornish Peninsula and Land’s End, and on, eventually, to Poole in Dorset, covering just over 1000km.

And by the time they had completed their trek they had a plan.

Raynor was in her teens when she met Moth, and loved him from the off. They married, had two children, and bought a run-down farm in Wales which they rebuilt and from which they ran holiday lets. Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

One Man’s Climb – a journey of trauma, tragedy and triumph on K2, by Adrian Hayes (Pen & Sword)

K2 is not the highest mountain in the world, but unlike Everest, very few people have climbed it.

It is more remote than Everest, which is why it never acquired a local name – the title K2 comes from the Great Trigonometrical Survey of British India, begun in 1802 and finished in 1871.

Italian climber Fosco Maraini referred to K2 as: “Just the bare bones of a name, all rock and ice and storm and abyss. It makes no sense to sound human. It is atoms and stars. It has all the nakedness of the world before the first man – or the cindered planet after the last.” Continue reading →