If you’re thinking of books as a summer holiday read or as Christmas gifts, there’s an embarrassment of riches out there. It could mean a one-stop shopping expedition, which is always a pleasure at this busy time.

Exclusive Books has produced its annual festive catalogue, Get in their Good Books, which is clever. Here are brief descriptions of some of the books they’ve posted, and at the end a reference to other books in the catalogue that have already been featured on The Books Page.

The top two books on my Christmas list are gorgeous picture books which also contain a wealth of information. Many Makhanda residents who have gone without water for months fear they face a dry Christmas. – Vivien Horler

Wood, Iron and Steel – Shipwrecks mapped off the Western Cape, by Bruce Henderson & Kelly Graham (Wreckless Marine/ Quickfox Publishing)

The arresting cover picture of this book is a multibeam image of the bulk carrier Daeyang Family, which ran aground off Robben Island in March 1986. The ship was carrying a cargo of iron ore from Brazil to its home port of Incheon in South Korea. The 28-member crew was helicoptered to safety.

This book features 60 shipwrecks dating from 1698 to 2009, including wooden sailing ships trading between Europe and the East, iron-hulled steamers and modern steel vessels.

As the blurb tells us: “Every wreck had a life before it was lost, and every loss is a tale of its own.”

Wreckless Marine is a Cape Town company that has worked closely with the Council for Geoscience SA’s minerals and energy unit, as well as the SA Heritage Resources Agency’s Maritime and Underwater Cultural Heritage.

The wrecks were surveyed over three years as part of a project to map the Western Cape’s seafloor. “Cutting-edge scanning technology enables us to view them as never before, while on-site dives and extensive research have added to what is known about each vessel.”

In his introduction, Cape Town author and shipping journalist Brian Ingpen gives a timeline of relevant dates in the Cape shipping industry, from circa 600 BC when the Phoenicians may have been the first navigators to round the Cape, to the sinking of the Seli 1 in 2009.

Many Cape Town readers will remember the sinking of the SA Seafarer off Green Point on 1966, the Antipolis and Romelia off Oudekraal and Llandudno respectively on the same stormy night in 1977, the Daeyang Family off Robben Island in 1986, and the Treasure in 2000 north of Robben Island, which led to an enormous penguin rescue effort.

Each entry about the 60 wrecks features pictures where they exist, details of the ship and its loss, dive pictures of the wreck and also the somewhat surreal multibeam images of the wrecks in situ.

Kirstenbosch – The most beautiful Garden in Africa (2^nd edition), by Brian J Huntley (Struik Nature/ Penguin Random House)

As we all know, Scotland is famous for its heathers.

But we who live in the Cape Floral Kingdom say pah! As this magnificent volume tells us, six species of heather grow “in the much-romanticised heathlands of Scotland”. On the Cape Peninsula – just the peninsula – we have 104.

Ericas are one of the three major fynbos families – the others are restios and proteas – and there are 816 species globally. Fynbos has 682 of them.

Kirstenbosch tells the story of the garden from the earliest years, its history, its people, its setbacks (there’ve been a few). And the book is magnificently illustrated with eye-wateringly beautiful photographs.

In the late 19^th century it was felt the Cape needed its own botanical garden, and the first site suggested was, logically, the Company’s Garden in the city centre. But apparently it was on the wrong side of the mountain, and constrained by the growing city.

Brian J Huntley, first CEO of the National Botanical Institute at Kirstenbosch, spent 19 years in the garden. He writes that in 1911, Henry Harold Welch Pearson, professor of botany at the SA College (later to become the University of Cape Town) and some like-minded chaps were looking for a spot for the garden. He had in mind somewhere on the slopes south of the old Groote Schuur zoo.

But they carried on hiking, heading through the avenue of Moreton Bay figs and camphor trees planted by Cecil John Rhodes, “and reached the site that became, and remains, the iconic point of entry into Kirstenbosch – the verdant sweep rising to the grandeur of Castle Rock, flanked by the rugged, forested eastern face of the Table Mountain massif. Pearson exclaimed: “This is the place.”

Anyone attending a Kirstenbosch summer concert on a late Sunday afternoon, their gaze lifting from the stage to the mountain on their left, knows he was right.

Nomad Heart – Adventures on and off the set, by Ian Roberts (Jonathan Ball)

I’d never heard of actor and musician Ian Roberts, until I realised he was the guy in the Castrol oil ads set at the Karoo Oasis. We’ve all seen them. But he’s probably more famous for his role as Sloet Steenkamp in the long-running series Arende, a series I’d never watched and had no idea was set in a prisoner-of-war camp ion the island of St Helena during the Boer War.

And now I’m sorry I’ve never seen it since I’ve been to St Helena and visited the beautiful, peaceful Boer cemetery there.

Roberts and his siblings grew up on an orange farm in the Eastern Cape, running wild in the holidays and attending school at posh St Andrews in what was then Grahamstown.

After the army and a stint as a clothing manager in what was then PE, he enrolled as a speech and drama student at Rhodes.

He’s acted in venues from Long Street to Los Angeles and has been in Shakespeare plays as well as films, such as the Oscar-winning Tsotsi.

It’s been a long and interesting career in music and the stage, and now it turns out he can write, too, with delicious spurts of humour.

Run. Risk. Reward. – My epic trail-running adventures, by Ryan Sandes, with Steve Smith (Penguin)

Ryan Sandes is a legend, a national treasure. I first heard of him in 2010 when he became the first runner to have won all four of the 4 Desert races, which are six-to-seven-day self-supported races through various deserts including the Sahara and the Antarctic.

The following year he comfortably won the Leadville Trail 100 in just 16:46:54, half an hour ahead of the next competitor and nearly eight hours ahead of the cut-off time. This race resonated with me because the following year I went to Leadville, which is so high up in the Colorado Rockies that these days they try not to allow to have babies born there, because the atmosphere is so thin.

I was interested because I was researching some family history and both my grandmother and her sister were born in Leadville in the 1880s – and survived. At 3 096m above sea level, even walking up a slight incline in the road made me breathless.

What Sandes did in the Leadville 100 was run 100 miles (160km) in the mountains above Leadville, with a course that takes you up and over a mountain, and then back, all within 24 hours. You start in the dark and end in the dark.

The story of this astonishing feat was told in Trailblazer, also co-authored by Steve Smith in 2016.

Now Sandes and Smith have a new volume, and this one opens with Sandes and his running partner Ryno Griesel on an epic marathon across Nepal, being hunted by bandits. Later while running 700km up Namibia’s Skeleton Coast, he encountered some very grumpy Namibian soldiers, and then there was the time, running the circumference of Lesotho with Griesel, they had to fight off an attack from local herdsmen.

Maybe this book should have been called Running for My Life.

The feats and tests – including Covid – contained in this volume look sure to be as extraordinary as those recounted in Trailblazer.

The Housefly Effect – How nudge psychology steers your everyday behaviour, by Eva van den Broek & Tim den Heijer (Bedford Square Publishers)

A wise old fisherman friend once told me while geelbek is a popular menu choice for Afrikaans speakers, English speakers tended to shun it. Until it was renamed, in English, Cape Salmon. And then it became popular with everyone.

I don’t know how true that is – I tried to Google it and didn’t find anything – but it matches what the Dutch authors of this fascinating book say in their introduction:  “When you give a fish a different name, people suddenly eat far more of it.”

This is all part of what has been dubbed “the housefly effect”, a small change in the environment that makes desired behaviour easier, more fun, or the obvious choice.

This book introduces the reader to many “houseflies”, like the sweets that line the supermarket till queues in an effort to prompt you to make an impulse buy, to those that help you drive more safely or live more healthily.

In a reference to gambling “houseflies”, the authors point out you swop your cash for chips in a casino not for security reasons, but because using chips means you don’t feel the pain of spending real money. Also you’ll see people around you winning, because the more prominently a slot machine is positioned, the more often it delivers a modest prize.

Sneaky. But it looks as though this title is bristling with insights.

I Will Not Be Silenced, by Karyn Maughan (Tafelberg)

This memoir tells us Karyn Maughan was 12 when she first knew she wanted to be a journalist. And she was determined.

I don’t remember the year, but fresh from a media studies and journalism master’s, she approached the Cape Argus news desk and asked if she could report for us, for free.

This was at a time when there was a determined effort to “transform” what had been an almost entirely white newsroom to one more reflective of the diverse population. That meant it became difficult to take on aspirant white reporters.

But the general attitude was that if she wanted to write for us, for free, well that was okay.

It soon became apparent to me – I was news editor at the time – that she was good. In some cases she was better than staff reporters and interns who were earning a salary. After a couple of months I went to the editor and said this was unconscionable – we at least needed to pay her lineage (payment per published line).

Eventually she was taken on full-time, for a proper salary. And her career was launched.

I tell this story to indicate something about Karyn’s determination. She wanted it, she could do it, and she succeeded.

So when she says, as she does in the title of her book: “I will not be silenced,” believe her.

Karyn became the Argus’s high court reporter, which she says she loved. And then she transferred to The Star, and in 2006 reported on Jacob Zuma’s rape trial. She was not to know this would be the start of 20 years reporting about Zuma’s legal problems, which eventually became her own as Zuma turned on her and state advocate Billy Downer.

Karyn writes: “I witnessed, again and again, how Zuma and his supporters viciously targeted anyone who sought to hold him accountable for his conduct… This is not only my story, and the reason I’m writing it is not just personal; it is also to honour all those who were targeted for speaking up long before I was.”

As Zuma has possibly already realised: Karyn Maughan is no push-over.

The Hidden Girl –  A novel – by Lucinda Riley (Macmillan)

Even as a young girl growing up on the Yorkshire moors in the mid-1970s, Leah is unusually attractive. And when she catches the attention of an arty neighbouring family, her life changes.

She becomes a top international model, but it turns out she has a past, involving the tragic tale of two young siblings in Poland in World War 2.

Her family’s secrets threaten to overwhelm her life, and she is reminded of a prediction by an old woman, regarded by the neighbourhood kids as a witch, who told her there was evil ahead of her, a doomed man who would come to find her on the moors. “You must be on your guard,” she tells the terrified child.

This hefty novel – more than 500 pages – also has a past. It is described as an international bestseller, yet has only just been published. Lucinda Riley’s son Harry Whittaker tells us in a foreword that The Hidden Girl was originally published under the title Hidden Beauty by Riley, then calling herself Lucinda Edmonds, in 1993, when she was just 26.

Her writing career had a hiccup in the late 1990s, and she died in 2021. When Whittaker read Hidden Beauty for the first time, he says he was enormously impressed. It was about thwarted ambition and forbidden love, revenge and murder, culminating in a fatal, forgotten prophecy.

So Whittaker decided to refresh and update the 1993 text, his duty being to “modernise perspectives and sensibilities without ripping out the heart of the novel”.

It looks promising, although Riley/Edmonds’s prose is a bit too adjective-heavy for me: “Rose Delancey dropped her fine sable brush into the jar of turpentine. She put down her palette on the paint-spattered workbench, and sank into the threadbare armchair, pushing her heavy titian hair away from her face…”

What Nelson Mandela Taught Me – Timeless lessons on leadership and life, by Zelda la Grange (Tafelberg)

It must have been tough, after 19 years spent largely devoting her life to Nelson Mandela as private secretary and aid, to have seen him go. Suddenly her raison d’etre was gone, along with her more-than-fulltime job. Not surprisingly she wrote what turned out to be a bestseller about her years with the leader, Good Morning, Mr Mandela.

And now she has written a second book, as well as making a living giving talks about him. She’s rather milking this, I thought, when I saw the book. But hey, she probably spent more time than anyone else with Madiba in those 19 years and clearly feels she still has something to say.

This volume however opens with an error of judgment for which she has beaten herself up. In January 2015 she flew to the UK to give a TEDx talk in Oxford, and while waiting, sleep-starved in an immigration queue at Heathrow, she fired off a series of tweets focusing on remarks by Jacob Zuma. She commented that whites were no longer wanted in South Africa, and that if she were a white investor she would withdraw her money. She added: “Oh wait. Whites’ tax is good enough for Nkandla but then you constantly have to be brutalised.”

Well, a bit like Helen Zille and her colonisation tweets, La Grange’s remarks  set off a firestorm. Unlike Zille, she was quickly mortified by what she’d said, especially when some people asked her: “Have you learnt nothing from Nelson Mandela?”

She realised she had of course, including the advice that you never respond in anger.

And so here is a volume of some life lessons. In the little I’ve read I found it somewhat on the preachy side: “What do you want to be known for? Being an angry, bitter person who can’t adapt to change, or someone who is willing to give up a little for the sake of the greater good?

“We should all do things we know we can do. Give your thoughts wings and interrogate your cognitive bias. The thing is, everyone belongs. It is what made Madiba so loved. He made us all belong…”

I think this will resonate with many people.

Matriarchs, Meze and the Evil Eye – A memoir, by Costa Ayiotis (Melinda Ferguson)

Having detailed his venture into the restaurant business – the late lamented Limonia in Hout Bay –  in his first book, My Big Fat Greek Taverna, he has now written a prequel memoir about growing up in what he calls “a trinity of chaos” – a South African home containing his mother, his Greek-Egyptian grandmother and his aunt.

His father was nominally there too, but he was mostly away on business. The focus of the family was little Kostaki, the prince, who was beloved by all three women.

The problem was that “giving three strong-willed and independently minded women free rein in … a busy household kitchen is courting disaster. We were your average dysfunctional family with one added ingredient: three women who all wanted to be the prima donna.”

He loved them equally, he says, but life wasn’t easy. “On a good day, they were a triumvirate of benevolent volatility. On a bad day, they were a trinity of chaos.”

This looks hilarious.

Crimson Sands – A novel, by Jeremy Vearey (Human & Rousseau)

The Bondelswarts are a Nama ethnic group, today based in southern Namibia, but at the time this epic historical novel begins in 1905 the group straddled the territory on both sides of the Orange River.

The Bondelswarts rose up against the Germans in SWA between 1903 and 1906, and were brutally suppressed. About 15 years later, when South Africa had a mandate from the League of Nations to govern SWA, the Bondelswarts rose up again, in a fight thought to have been sparked by an increase in the dog tax.

Once again the Bondelswarts were crushed, with the deaths of around 100 Bondelswarts, including some women and children.

Wikipedia says the activist and scholar Ruth First, herself murdered in Mozambique by the apartheid government many years later, described the attack on the Bondelswarts, which included an aircraft sent to bomb them, as “the Sharpeville of the 1920s”.

This is the historical background of Crimson Sands, by the respected/notorious former policeman Jeremy Vearey, and focuses on Dirk Aruseb, a teenager who is fetched from an orphanage in Pella in the Northern Cape to join the Bondelswarts.

Dirk was always on his own, known in his orphanage as the Bosluis Baster for his straw-coloured peppercorns and grey eyes. But now he has a cause, to fight the German Schutztruppe, and he is taught the mechanics of war in the Bondelswarts’ stronghold at Schansvlakte in the Great Kara ountains of Namaland.

The cover describes Crimson Sands as an epic story of war across territories from Tsumeb to Upington, from internment camps in Luderitzbucht to the Fish River Canyon.

(This novel is not included in Exclusive Books’s Christmas catalogue)

The Books Page has in previous months featured a number of other books included in Exclusive Books’s Christmas catalogue, such as:

• The brilliant The Glass Maker, by Tracy Chevalier, about the history of Venetian glass;
• The gripping thriller Fire and Bones by forensic anthropologist Kathy Reichs;
• Exit Wounds, Peter Godwin’s memoir of his mother’s death and his life’s slump;
• A Short Life, a novel by Nicky Greenwall, the strange story of two car accidents on Constantia Nek on the same night, and how they change lives;
• The family epic The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese set in Kera Kerala, India.