These are among the books that landed on my desk this month. The first three – One Call Away, The Secret History of Sharks, and Addict – along with Harlan Coben’s Nobody’s Fool, which was reviewed in full on Sunday April 20, are all on Exclusive Books’s list of top reads for April.
Some of the books below will be reviewed in full later. – Vivien Horler

One Call Away: The (intimate) story of the doctor who stood between death and survival, by Anne Biccard (Jacana)
This is Johannesburg doctor Dr Anne Biccard’s third memoir of working in A&E at a Gauteng public hospital, written with concern, humour and warmth.
She admits doctors aren’t always right. One of the first cases she mentions is that of a small child who fell off the bed and may have a broken arm. The child is cradling his left arm, but when Biccard studies the X-rays, she can’t see a problem.
Clearly though something is wrong, so she rings a radiologist – at home at dawn on a Sunday – to ask her to have a look. She confirms the arm is fine, adding: “But it is just the broken clavicle…”
Biccard had scrutinised the arm in great detail, but her eye never went as high as the collar bone, which is clearly snapped in half.
“Ohhh,” she says weakly, to chortles on the other end of the line.
Biccard describes what practising medicine is like in all its gory glory, and doesn’t spare the reader much.

If you’re a young person dreaming of being a doctor, a book like this might set your ambitions in stone, or drive you, screaming, away from the medical profession.
But I thoroughly enjoyed her first two books, and expect to enjoy this one too.

The Secret History of Sharks – The rise of the ocean’s most fearsome predators, by John Long (Quercus)
John Long, now Strategic Professor of Palaeontology at Flinders University in Australia, has been collecting shark fossils, mainly teeth, since the age of seven.
He has, he says, a deep respect for the role sharks have played in regulating their ecosystems, and how they have adapted over hundreds of millions of years to Earth’s constant engine of change.
He describes sharks as “the poster children for evolutionary success, the prism through which we can see the struggles of all life – maybe even our own”.
They have some extraordinary gifts: their sense of smell is capable of detecting minute amounts of blood or other organic compounds in the water from hundreds of metres away.
They are also able to detect the faint electrical fields of other living creatures, which Long points out is handy when your prey might be buried under sand.
“It has been claimed that sharks can detect electric currents as weak of one billionth of a volt, and that if two AA batteries were connected under the sea, a shark could sense the charge from a thousand miles away.”
How did sharks survive so many extinction events that wiped out other creatures, such as the dinosaurs?
The answers are here, in more than 400 pages. That might be a bit much for the average reader, but the American scientist, author and historian Jared Diamond says of this book: “Will keep you on the edge of your sea from its first page to its last.”

Addict – A tale of drugs and recovery, by Milton Schorr (Penguin)
Milton Schorr was a happy little Cape Town boy, singing around the house. He had a mum, a dad and two sisters. He didn’t see his dad much, as he was always working, but his mum loved him.
When he was seven his dad left, and the family had to move to a much smaller home. Mum had to work now, and just wasn’t that loving, always-there presence any more.
In his early teens, Milton became enraged, furious, angry. Shoplifting, porn, cigarettes of course, booze, weed. It all helped him to be the person he felt he really was – broken, a wreck, unlovable.
When he was 15 he watched the Leonardo DiCaprio movie Basketball Diaries. He writes: “Where others saw a tragedy on the screen, I saw something more. In Leo’s haunted face as he wandered the streets of New York a drug-soaked wreck, I saw absolution. I saw peace.
“Because release comes when the inside matches the outside, even if just for a moment.”
So at 17, when he was offered heroin, he stuck out his arm. A friend said: “You sure?” Milton nodded. “The answer was always yes.”
Clean for 19 years when he sat down to write this book, he asked himself: “Why did I choose to see the dark, when my friends did not?”
This book is the answer.

Juliet Prowse: Born to Dance – The extraordinary life story of my aunt, by Juliet E Prowse
When I received an email from Juliet Prowse, I was a bit surprised. I’d certainly heard of her, but was she still alive?
Well, no, she died in 1996, just days before her 60th birthday, it turns out. My emailer was Juliet E Prowse, the famous dancer’s niece, who had written a biography of her. Would I give it some publicity?
When I was growing up, Juliet Prowse – the aunt – was famous in her home country of South Africa as a dancer, singer and actor. She was also famous for her legs that went on forever. There’s a picture of Prowse on the back cover of this volume doing the splits while upright and dancing in high heels.
Photographs would appear in the newspapers of her with Frank Sinatra, who asked her to marry him, and Elvis Presley, with whom she starred in the film GI Blues. She had a 40-year career, mainly in the US, and was hugely famous.
Not bad for a girl who spent part of her childhood in Kimberley and who grew up in South Africa.

The Lions’ Den, by Iris Mwanza (Canongate)
Newly qualified lawyer Grace Zulu has her first case: to defend Willbess Mulenga against charges of committing acts “against nature” – being in drag at a pub, and later being caught having sex with an unknown male patron. This might be 1990s Zambia, but Zulu is pretty sure homosexuality isn’t “against nature”.
It’s a pro bono case, which no one else wanted, but Zulu is excited about the challenge.
When she goes to the central police station to meet her client, the policeman at the door asks her for an “expediting fee”. However, when it emerges they come from neighbouring villages, he drops this demand, saying that next time she must just bring a “token of appreciation”.
But when Mulenga is brought into the interview room, Zulu is shocked. His face is bruised, his right eye swollen shut, and one of his teeth is chipped.
The policeman tells her Mulenga was injured when he resisted arrest, but Zulu points out the injuries are fresh, while Mulenga was arrested five weeks earlier.
Her argument angers the policeman, who tells her the interview is over. Enraged, Zulu threatens to file a complaint for police brutality, and for soliciting a bribe.
The policeman shoves Zulu with such force that she falls, hitting her head on the floor and passing out.
And that’s the beginning of what looks like a fascinating debut novel.
Dr Iris Mwanza is a Zambian-American writer, a lawyer and deputy director of women and leadership in the Gender Equality Division of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.