Here is a taste of the books that landed on my desk this month. The first four are from Exclusive Books’ list of top reads for April. Another, One of the Good Guys by Araminta Hall (Macmillan) was reviewed on this website on Sunday April 21. Some of the rest will be reviewed in full later. – Vivien Horler

Love and Fury – A memoir, by Margie Orford (Jonathan Ball Publishers)

Most readers know Margie Orford for her crime thrillers, the five Clare Hart novels (a sixth is due to be published next year). She’s been described as the “queen of SA crime-thriller writers” by The Weekender.

I didn’t know about her impressive academic pedigree. She was a Fulbright Scholar with a master’s degree in comparative literature from the City University of New York, and has a PhD in English literature from the University of East Anglia. She is an honorary fellow of St Hugh’s College, Oxford, and was also an executive board member of PEN International.

This memoir opens in London, where Orford finds a small home overlooking Hampstead Heath, a refuge after the collapse of her marriage, and three “vagrant years” after she fled Cape Town.

She is thoroughly depressed, and says for months she had been trying to write a suicide note “…but my writing, which I regard as separate from me – something life and death-giving, beneficient and tyrannical as the Furies… – vetoed me”.

She casts about, she says for a way to leave life that would not disturb anyone.

And then she goes for a wintry walk on the heath, comes home, tears out all the pages of the “to whom it may concern” death notes, and is ready “for the shy night creatures of the mind to slip out of their shadows so I could befriend them”.

And she adds: “This book kept me alive; I will give it that.”

James, by Percival Everett (Doubleday)

I don’t know how much of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn you remember, but it’s set in the 1850s or so and is about a barely educated teenager who fakes his own death to get away from a drunken, abusive father.

He teams up with a runaway slave, and the pair set off on a raft down the Mississippi River, having a variety of life and death adventures on the way. It was first published in 1884.

In this novel Percival Everett, a Distinguished Professor of English at UCLA, rewrites Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of the slave Jim, and gives us a unique insight into the strategies a literate and intelligent slave had to use not to stand out from the crowd.

Everett, whose novel Erasure was adapted to become the film American Fiction, uses different dialects to indicate when Jim is speaking in his own voice, and in that of an uneducated slave when he is talking to whites: “Lak I say, I furst found my hat up on dat nail. I ain’t put dat dere… How dat hat git dere?”

The American writer Ann Patchett describes James as “funny and horrifying, brilliant and riveting… a powerful, necessary corrective to both literature and history… Who should read this book? Every single person in the country.”

The Excitements, by CJ Wray (Orion)

“Revenge is a dish best served old” is the subtitle of this fictional romp starring two very old ladies, the Williamson sisters, who are Britain’s most treasured World War II veterans.

Because they represent a literally dying breed, they are in demand at commemorative events, and always give their money’s worth. They are adored and watched over by their great-nephew Archie, who accompanies them on a trip to Paris to receive the Legion d’Honneur.

Archie knows some of their wartime history in the Wrens and the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (risibly known as Fany), but it turns out not as much as he thought. As the cover points out, there’s a reason sweet Auntie Penny can dispatch a would-be mugger with her umbrella.

Now the sisters are in Paris, probably for the last time, to have some excitements, settle some scores and avenge lost friends.

One reviewer says: “Not all heroes wear capes, some wear M&S cardigans! A triumph!”

The Excitements looks delightful.

How to Stop a Train – The story of how Mohandas Gandhi became the Mahatma, by Stephanie Ebert and Kathryn Pillay, illustrated by Paddy Bouma (Pan Macmillan Children’s Books)

I don’t usually review children’s books but I thought this story, which is of course set in SA, would be interesting. How do you convey what was a pivotal moment in Gandhi’s life, a deeply political act, in a way that’s meaningful to children?

Gandhi’s ejection from a train because he refused, as an Indian, to move from first class to third class, where the South African Railways thought he belonged, marked the beginning of a journey, “a journey to teach everyone that you can change the world without using violence. A journey to make the world a better place. A long journey that begins with one small word: No.”

Besides simply telling this story, the authors provide context, describing the SA of the time, notes for parents and a glossary of terms such as civil rights and indentured labourers.

It’s an inspiring story which tells youthful readers that across the world Gandhi’s ideas helped people to stand together, put their bodies in the way of danger, stare down injustice and say one little word: “No. You may not treat people this way.”

Hunting with the Hawks – Untold crime stories from the elite SA crime-fighting unit, by Graham Coetzer (Tafelberg)

Graham Coetzer has spent 13 years working on Carte Blanche programmes, doing what he says he loves best: “exposing the people who scam, exploit, bully and otherwise do harm to ordinary South Africans”.

In the preface he says this volume is not masquerading as a PR exercise for the Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation, the body founded in 2008 to target organised crime, economic crime and corruption.

He was inspired to write the book since the nature of the Hawks’ work means most of us never get to hear first-hand accounts of their stories. “Despite often risking their lives for us, they get very little recognition.”

So here’s a behind the scenes glimpse of some of the work they do.

I’ve read only one of the case histories, that involving a trafficking and racketeering operation run, originally in Blouberg in 2017, and headed by a woman, Shantel Reyneke-Bridger.

She ran brothels, sold drugs, and was involved in extorting money from her male clients, who were terrified of being exposed. She also employed many young women, some of them under age, ensured they became drug addicts, and kept them in thrall with the help of violent heavies.

She and her two major partners, her husband and her boyfriend, who all lived together, made a lot of money, yet their brothels were dirty and squalid. Where did all the money go, Coetzer wondered. To casinos, it turned out – all three had serious gambling problems.

Now all three are serving 20-year sentences.

Not a comfortable book to read, I suspect, but ultimately showing that crime can be tackled.

The Invincible Miss Cust – A novel, by Penny Haw (Sourcebooks)

About two weeks ago I reviewed a new book by Penny Haw, The Woman at the Wheel, about the wife of Carl Benz, who invented the first “horseless carriage”. Bertha Benz was a staunch supporter of her husband and I found the book extremely interesting.

The Invincible Miss Cust is about another determined woman, and I think of the two books possibly even more readable. It is relatively new, published in 2022, and I got it from my book club.

Aleen Cust was the first woman veterinary surgeon in Britain and Ireland. Despite completing the practical and course work to become a vet set by the New Veterinary College in Edinburgh in 1897, she was denied registration by the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons because of her gender. It was to be more than 20 years before the college relented and admitted her, in 1922.

This meant despite having better marks than many of her fellow (male) students in the final exams, she had to sit at the back of the graduation hall and watch her classmates graduate.

But she did not let this set her back – she found work with an Irish vet in Roscommon and worked alongside him for years. Penny Haw speculates in this, her first historical novel, that Cust and the Irish vet had an intense relationship, although there is no proof of this.

But even the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography suspects it was so.

My only criticism of Miss Cust, and it’s not really a fair one, is that since it is published by a US publisher, all the spellings are American despite the fact author Penny Haw is South African and Miss Cust was Anglo-Irish.

I found this a really enjoyable and inspiring read.