These are among the books that have landed on my desk this month. Not all have been read yet, and some will have fuller reviews. – Vivien Horler

The Grief Handbook – A guide through the worst days of your life, by Bridget McNulty (Self-published)

At a time of pandemic, when grief stalks the land, Cape Town-based Bridget McNulty has penned a timeous book to help the bereaved cope. Death is always with us, yet most of us have no idea what to do and how to react when someone close to us dies. Her mother was 72 when she started having odd symptoms. A physician diagnosed cancer and just 13 days later her mother died. McNulty, her father and her brothers were knocked sideways. She sought books to help her through, but suffering from the fog of grief she found books on death were either too dense, philosophical or religious. McNulty concedes she is not an expert on grief, but she has consulted many such experts and this slim volume contains suggestions that helped her and will probably help others. For example: treat yourself gently. Eat and go to bed at normal times. Move your body. And don’t question your feelings: what you’re feeling is right for you.

Ougat – From a hoe into a housewife and then some, by Shana Fife (Jonathan Ball Publishers)

Writes Shana Fife at the beginning of this memoir: “I promise this book will have all of the elements that make for a real Coloured skinnerstorie.” It’s about growing up on the Cape Flats and the mixed messages passed on to a coloured girl child. The opening lines are: “The very first rule you are given as a Coloured child who has a vagina is that no one is allowed to touch it. Ever. Even with your consent. Especially not with your consent.” Fife, now 30, had two children by different fathers by the time she was 23, and was trying to emerge from a viciously destructive relationship with her second child’s father. At a low point she began writing a blog about who she was and where she was going, and this changed her life. She writes of how toxic masculinity can shape and trap a woman “from the cot to the cot because our whole purposes, from when we are babies, is to eventually have our own babies”. This memoir is shocking, frighteningly honest and disarming.

• This is one of Exclusive Books’s 40 top book choices for July.

Unbecoming, by Joanne Fedler (Penguin Books)

In what would usually be called an “Author’s Note” and is here labelled an “Author’s Warning”, SA-born novelist Joanne Fedler says our second life begins when we hit 50 or so and realise: “Shit, I’m running out of time.” This is when we start to question our values and certainties, spouses and friends, and wonder if having kids was worth it. This, she says, is where our second life begins and where this novel kicks off. Jo takes a three-month sabbatical from her life – as a wife and mother – and is invited to join her friend Fiona and her mates on a sacred walk in the Australian bush to mark Fiona’s 57^th birthday. Jo isn’t that keen – she doesn’t know Fiona’s friends – but she figures she could manage one night. And then a stranger joins them around the fire in their overnight camp, and there are all sorts of unintended consequences as they ponder life, midlife and truth – ánd, as the cover blurb puts it, wonder what to do with vaginas that are not ready to be put out to pasture just yet.

• This is one of Exclusive Books’s 40 top book choices for July.

Still Life, by Sarah Winman (4^th Estate)

I think I chose this novel because it’s by the women who wrote the gorgeous When God was a Rabbit. But this one is not set in Cornwall, it’s set in Tuscany in 1944. Elizabeth Skinner is in her 60s, an art historian and possibly a spy who has come to Italy to salvage paintings from the wreckage of war and remember the time she met EM Forster there. She comes across a young British soldier, Ulysses Temper, and they talk of truth and beauty, a conversation that will affect the rest of Temper’s life, and of those who love him. Still Life looks wonderful, although I wonder why writers dispense with quotation marks.

• This is one of Exclusive Books’s 40 top book choices for July.

Lean Fall Stand, by Jon McGregor (4^th Estate)

This novel opens with a blast, or more accurately, a blizzard. Doc, Tom and Luke are on an Antarctic research mission and have set off on skidoos from the hut, taking pictures. With the three men barely a few dozen metres apart, a storm sweeps down off a glacier and they are blinded by a white-out. Tom tries to move towards where he believes Luke is, but suddenly there is water ahead of him instead of ice. Something is wrong. This moment has terrible consequences for the men and their families. In a shout on the cover Hamnet author Maggie O’Farrell writes: “A spectacular book… it does what Jon McGregor does so well: examine the widening ripples of a single event. I read it again, as soon as I’d finished it.”

• This is one of Exclusive Books’s 40 top book choices for July.

Great Circle, by Maggie Shipstead (Doubleday)

This is the story of an air-splitting fictional female pilot ­– think Amelia Earhart – who flies Spitfires during World War II, does dare-devil stunts over the forests of Montana, and who dreams of flying a great circle, a pole-to-pole circumnavigation of the globe. But as she is about to fly the last leg, from Antarctica to New Zealand, she crashes. Interwoven with Graves’s story is that of young Hollywood star Hadley Baxter who, 50 years after Graves’s death, is cast to play Graves in a bio-pic. It turns out the two women have a lot more in common than one would think. This is a novel of freedom, danger and obsession against the sweep of history.

• This is one of Exclusive Books’s 40 top book choices for July.