These are among the books that landed on my desk this month, and it’s been a fabulous haul. The first three – Blood’s Inner Rhymes, The Tell and A Mouth Full of Salt – (along with The Wild Dogs, which will be reviewed on Sunday, May 25) are from Exclusive Books’s top reads for May. Some of these books will be reviewed in full later. – Vivien Horler

Blood’s Inner Rhymes, by Antjie Krog (Penguin Books)

This title is referred to as “an autobiographical novel”, so obviously based on fact and yet leaving the author some space to work.

It begins with Antjie Krog back from a year-long stint overseas, and driving through her beloved Free State to visit her elderly mother, the now late Afrikaans writer Dot Serfontein, on the farm.

Her mother is in her 90s and needs carers, but her mind is sharp, and mother and daughter bond once again.

Serfontein takes Krog aback with a direct question the morning after she arrives: “Do you shit in the mornings or later in the day?”

She then explains – there has been no water for a week, and morning shitters go to the farmhouse for ablutions. But if she’s a late-afternoon shitter, then she’ll clash with the rest of the family’s needs.

In her new book Krog writes about her relationship with her mother – Krog is one of five children – and her reflections on the fact they’re two writers within the same family. She looks at cultural heritage, including the Boer War, ageing, as well as land ownership and race.

The blurb on the back tells us this is Krog’s “most personal book, as well as the most universal”.

Krog is best known as a writer for her personal account of covering the Truth and Reconciliation Commissin hearings, Country of My Skull, as a journalist.

She has won pretty well every major SA literary prize, including the Eugene Marais Prize, the Hertzog Prize, the Alan Paton Award and the Olive Schreiner Prize.

I am very much looking forward to reading this.

The Tell – A memoir, by Amy Griffin (Ebury Press)

This is the story of a secret Amy Griffin kept for decades, one she had buried so deeply she didn’t even know it was there.

“Most of us carry secrets: things that we were told not to reveal or things we simply couldn’t…”

She says, in her author’s note: “Now I understand that the telling is the medicine – not the cause of shame but the thing that heals it.”

Griffin writes that her thing was running. “I ran in the mornings and in the afternoons, and I ran at night… with no one around, I felt free … like I’d arrived at a place where nobody could touch me.”

She grew up, she went to college, she worked, she married and had children, and still she ran. And did everything she could to show how perfect her life was.

But was there something she was running from?

This is an extraordinary story of abuse about which she had no idea. I’ve read of this before, notably in Jane Smiley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1991 novel A Thousand Acres, and it seems to me so incredibly unlikely. And yet it clearly is not.

While full of pain and suffering, this memoir is also beautifully written and is ultimately uplifting.

A Mouth Full of Salt, by Reem Gaafar (Saqi Books)

With the war in Ukraine, Israel and the uptick in the decades-long conflict between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, it is easy for many of us, and the wider non-African world, to forget about the devasting civil war in Sudan.

Not so easy if you’re Sudanese.

In this debut novel Reem Gaafar, now based in Canada along with her husband and sons, writes of village life along the Nile in Sudan, a river that brings life but also takes it away.

It begins with the search for an eight-year-old boy who was swimming in the river with friends, and then was snatched by a current.

Sixteen-year-old Fatima watches the search for the child, and muses: “The Nile was a trap that attracted, ensnared and buried all at once. It took as much as it gave them and more. The river brought them life. But the river was not their friend.”

The disappearance of the boy is only the first chapter of a series of disasters. Soon after the animals start dying of a mysterious illness and the date plantations burn down. The village thinks back to a long-buried secret – could this be the source of the trouble?

Meanwhile in the capital Khartoum, a single mother tries to make her way in a society that has no interest in women making their way. Now she needs to go back to the village and face both her former neighbours and the river that took so much.

Proteas of the Fynbos, by John Manning, photographs by Colin Paterson-Jones (Struik Nature)

Proteas are famed for their long lives, with the seeds of pincushion proteas known to survive in the soil for up to 80 years, but they can do better than that.

Seeds of the tree pincushion Leucospermum concarpodendron, along with a few other labelled packets of seeds, were tucked into a notebook by the Dutch merchant Jan Teerlink, but never reached Holland.

Instead the notebook was seized as a prize of war by the Royal Navy in 1803, and languished undisturbed in the British National Archives until it was discovered in 2005.

The next year botanists managed to germinate one of the eight 203-year-old seeds of the tree pincushion, and the plant is now thriving at the Royal Botanic Gardens, at Kew in London.

How’s that for a story of resilience?

This tale is recounted in this splendid full-colour guide, whose pictures give the lie to the belief that fynbos is a bit dull.

Over 90% of South Africa’s proteas are restricted to the fynbos of the Cape Floristic Region, which stretches from Nieuwoudtville in the west to Gqeberha in the east, but are found mostly in the mountains and coastal lowlands of the extreme south-west of the country.

Proteas are threatened, with more than 180 proteas, half the species in the country, being Red Listed.

This guide is comprehensive but small enough to be carried in a   backpack. It is a companion volume to Manning’s Ericas of the Fynbos.

Led by Shepherds, by Jeffrey Rakabe (Jacana)

I do some editing for an Eastern Cape newspaper, and every December-January and June-July I read articles about the summer and winter initiation ceremonies.

They seldom make cheerful reading.

Jeffrey Shepherd’s memoir is not an Eastern Cape one – he is from Lebowa in Limpopo, and it would seem many of the details, except of course the central one, are different.

For one thing, he was 12 when he went “to the mountain”, technically illegally young in the Eastern Cape, and he had not had a medical. His mother was unhappy, but his grandmother told her: “How can you not be proud?” And so off he went.

He survives, more or less intact, and many years later, as a student in Johannesburg, discovers books and the delights of the Johannesburg Public Library (closed in 2021 and partially reopened in March).

Caring women, including his mother, his partner and a librarian, encourage him to investigate links between the initiation rite he experienced which was full of misogynistic language, and the scourge of gender-based violence in South Africa.

This looks like an eye-opener.