These are among the books that landed on my desk this month. The first four – Exit Wounds, There are Rivers in the Sky, How to Say Babylon, and The Dark Wives, are part of a list of Exclusive Books’s top reads for September. Some will be reviewed in full later. – Vivien Horler
Exit Wounds: A story of love, loss and occasional wars, by Peter Godwin (Picador Africa)
I pounced on this memoir, having thoroughly appreciated Peter Godwin’s earlier two: Mukiwa, a coming-of-age tale about growing up white in Rhodesia during the war for independence, and When a Crocodile Eats the Sun, about the collapse of his family as Zimbabwe itself goes into a death spiral.
His father dies in the second memoir, by which time Godwin is living in the US, having married a Yorkshire woman he met while a student in the UK. They have a son, and there is a line that struck me: their little family speaks with three different accents.
There was another bit that nearly reduced me to tears: Godwin and his sister want their mother, now elderly and poor thanks to crippling inflation, to leave Zimbabwe and go back to England, but she is resisting them. She’s lived there for 40 years or so, working as a doctor, and when her children pile on the pressure, she sends them a Rudyard Kipling poem purportedly in the voice of a Roman centurion ordered home to Rome after decades in Britain:
“Legate, I come to you in tears – My cohort ordered home!/ I’ve served in Britain forty years. What should I do in Rome?/ Here is my heart, my soul, my mind – the only life I know./ I cannot leave it all behind. Command me not to go!”
But she eventually did leave, as we discover in the opening pages of Exit Wounds. She stays in London with her daughter Georgina, while Peter often flies to see her from New York.
But he says sadly: “There is a sad symmetry to our relationship. I spent the first decade of my life trying to summon my mother’s attention, and she has spent the last decade of hers trying to summon mine.”
There are Rivers in the Sky, by Elif Shafak (Viking/Penguin Books)
This novel has an extraordinarily broad sweep, from the ancient city of Nineveh to Victorian London, then on to Turkey in 2014 and finally back to London in 2018.
The cover blurb tells us this is the story of a lost poem: The Epic of Gilgamesh, two great rivers and three remarkable lives, all connected by a single drop of water, one that keeps being recycled from raindrop to earth and thence back to sky… it’s the sort of story that gets me using the word thence.
I suspect this novel may be a touch higher grade, but it gets enthusiastic shouts from the likes of the great British classicist Mary Beard (“A brilliant, unforgettable novel”) and the best-selling writers Philippa Gregory (“The story flows like the rivers from ancient Nineveh to present-day London, with characters of the distant past as bright and vivid as those of today”), William Boyd, Arundhati Roy and Ian McEwan.
How to Say Babylon – A Jamaican memoir, by Safiya Sinclair (4th Estate)
Safiya Sinclair grew up in Jamaica, desperate to be a writer and live her own life, but she and her family were dominated by her father, a member of a militant Rasta sect who rejected Babylon, his term for the corrupting influence of the West.
She made it – she has written three prize-winning books and is currently an associate professor of creative writing at Arizona State University.
How she escaped her repressive background is the subject of what the Spectator calls “this electrifying memoir”, which was also one of the Guardian’s “best memoirs and biographies of 2023”.
Writer Elif Shafak – see above – said of Babylon: “I absolutely adored this book… Heartbreaking and heartwarming.”
The Dark Wives – A Vera thriller, by Ann Cleeves (Macmillan)
I’m an enormous fan of Ann Cleeves’s various series of detective thrillers: the Shetland novels, the Two Rivers novels and of course the Vera Stanhope novels, as personified in the TV series by the brilliant actress Brenda Blethyn. (“What’s that, pet?”)
In The Dark Wives, an early morning dog walker finds a body (early-morning dog walkers have a lot to answer for) on a common near a care home for troubled teens. He turns out to be Josh, a staff member.
Detective Inspector Vera Stanhope is called in, and finds her only clue is the disappearance of Chloe Spence, 14, one of the home’s residents. Then a second body is found near the Three Dark Wives, standing stones in the Northumbrian countryside, and “superstition and folklore begin to collide with fact”.
Ann Cleeves has dedicated this detective thriller “to teens everywhere, and especially to the Dark Wives – uppity young women with minds of their own struggling to find a place in a difficult world”.
The Super Cadres – ANC misrule in the age of deployment, by Pieter du Toit (Jonathan Ball Publishers)
Quoting ANC chairman Gwede Mantashe, former Chief Justice Raymond Zondo said in his report, into the allegations of state capture, that the strategic deployment of comrades was an important part of the ANC’s strategy to control the levers of state power.
And we know where that has led. In the prologue to what is clearly an important book about the state of our nation, Pieter du Toit writes that as the party’s secretary general during its most destructive decade, its chair since 2017 “and one of the most enthusiastic defenders of its “ruinous cadre deployment policy, [Gwede Mantashe] bears more responsibility than most for [the party’s] fate in the 2024 elections.
“Mantashe represents a refusal to reform. And the downfall of the ANC.”
In his introduction, Du Toit writes that cadre deployment was formalised as far back as 1997 as a mechanism to ensure the party’s complete dominance over power in the state.
The system, introduced during Nelson Mandela’s time at the helm of both party and country, “but formulated and implemented by [Thabo] Mbeki, ensured that the ANC’s culture of patronage politics and rent-seeking would flourish. Mbeki’s intention with cadre deployment was to ensure the supremacy of African nationalism and party control. But what it eventually led to was the severe weakening of the state, institutional corruption and the rise of a predatory class of ANC deployees focused on large-scale resource extraction”.
Du Toit says his book exposes the depravity of cadre deployment. He goes further, he says, and attempts to explain how the ANC’s super cadres, a class of political power brokers and party headmen, consolidated their power and how the ANC squandered almost every opportunity to modernise SA after 1994, bringing the country to the brink.
Blood Brothers – to Operation Smokeshell and back, by Leon Lamprecht (Jonathan Ball Publishers)
As a female, I was never conscripted into the SA Defence Force, and when I was of an age to have boyfriends and a brother in the military – all in the navy for one thing, so based at Saldanha, Gordon’s Bay and Simon’s Town – it seemed a more innocent age.
As a result I’ve never been particularly interested in the slew of books that have been written about the ghastly experiences of the troepies (and fighters on the other side) in the then South West Africa and Angola.
Journalist Deon Lamprecht was with 61 Mech in Angola, and has now written three books about the war. This one is about a battle he was not part of, which wreaked terrible damage on both sides.
But he says this book is not about glorifying a long-ago war – the battle of Smokeshell took place on a single day in June 1980 – “it is about camaraderie, mutual respect and social support in the here and now”.
It also talks about the horror that can still surface among the men who fought there, and the physical pain and disability some of them suffer to this day.