These are among the books that landed on my desk this month. Some will be reviewed in full later. The first four: The Names, The Immortalites, 38 Londres Street and Summer Island, are from Exclusive Books’s top reads for July. Some of these books will be reviewed in full later. – Vivien Horler

The Names, by Florence Knapp

It is October 1987 and Cora is wheeling her new baby boy in his pram to register his birth. Her husband, Gordon, expects her to record the baby’s name as Gordon, a name passed down by the men in Gordon’s family. But Cora thinks to herself that by calling the baby Gordon he might turn out like her husband.

She asks her nine-year-old daughter Maia what name she would choose for the baby. She likes Julian – a name Cora also favours. But then Maia says the name she really prefers: Bear. “It sounds all soft and cuddly and kind,” she says. “But also, brave and strong.”

These are qualities Cora hopes for her son. She knows going against Gordon’s wishes will have consequences, but naming the baby after his father, grandfather and great-grandfather feels like “a chest-beating, tribal thing”.

So Cora registers the baby as Bear. Or is it Julian? Or is it Gordon? And do these names affect how the baby turns out?

There are three stories here – one about Bear, one about Julian and one about little Gordon. It is also about standing up to a dominating man, and the bond that develops between the boy and Maia.

This is a debut novel, and has had a slew of wonderful reviews, with people describing it as heartbreaking, hopeful, gorgeously crafted, gripping and resonant. One reviewer wrote: “Knapp deftly weaves three narrative strands into a powerful examination of free will, generational trauma and fate…”

The Immortalites, by Claire Robertson (Umuzi)

I have high hopes for this novel after Claire Robertson’s wonderful The Magistrate of Gower.

Ellen Kent has grown up an orphan in a bleak British home for girls.

She feels she has never belonged – and then comes an opportunity: to become a governess for a family heading for the eastern frontier of the Cape Colony.

But after a nightmarish voyage aboard the Immortalite, she is once again abandoned, and now she is in a land that offers little comfort. After dropping most of its passengers in Simon’s Town, the ship proceeds up the east coast.

Eventually Ellen finds herself in a tent town with her keeper, Captain Makepeace, spending her days trying to find scraps of food.

The blurb on the cover tells us this is “a sweeping frontier fable, a masterfully crafted tale of survival, discovery and the search for belonging”.

38 Londres Street – On impunity, Pinochet in England and a Nazi in Patagonia, by Philippe Sands (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)

Philippe Sands is a British human rights lawyer whose previous books include East West Street, about the Nuremberg trials and the acceptance of the legal terms “genocide” and “crimes against humanity”; and The Last Colony about the plight of the Chagossian islanders who were evicted from their homes by the British government so the Americans could build an air base in the Indian Ocean.

Londres Street is a street in central Santiago, Chile, and no 38 was the home of the Yucatan Barracks, an address with links both to Augusto Pinochet, former president of Chile, and Walter Rauff, a former Nazi SS officer who used gas vans to exterminate Jews during World War 2.

Pinochet had been president of Chile’s military junta and of the country from 1973 to 1990, and was believed to have been responsible for the disappearance of thousands of his countrymen.

In 1998 he was in a London clinic for back treatment when police entered his room and arrested him on charges of crimes against humanity and genocide.

Sands was called in to advise him on his claim to immunity from prosecution but later, in part after a conversation with his wife who said she would divorce him if he represented Pinochet, he ended up representing a human rights organisation against him.

Later he came across Pinochet’s connection to Rauff, and the possibility the former Nazi was connected to some of Chile’s “disappeared”.

This book is described as “a blend of personal memoir, historical detective work and gripping courtroom drama to probe a secret double story of mass murder, one that reveals a shocking thread that links the horrors of the 1940s with those of our own times”.

Summer Island, by Kristin Hannah (Macmillan)

Kristin Hannah is another author I admire. Her last book, The Women, about American nurses in the Vietnam war, was fabulous.

This latest offering is about the joys and perils of the mother-daughter relationship.

Norah Bridge is a Dear Abby advisor on a radio talk show, projecting a kind, wholesome and understanding persona to the people who call in to her in distress.

But what they don’t know is that years before, Norah had an affair and walked out of her marriage, leaving her two young daughters behind. This has been a carefully preserved secret, as if it became known, it would dent her image big time.

Her relationship with her elder daughter is so-so, but is non-existent with the younger, Ruby, a struggling stand-up comedian.

Then one day the tabloids discover Norah’s secret, and uncover some dodgy black-and-white pictures she actually posed for – and just like that her radio career is over.

Meanwhile Ruby has been using her famous mother to fuel her comedy schtik. Two things happen – Norah is injured in an accident, and a glossy magazine offers Ruby a lot of money to write a tell-all book about her mother.

Ruby thinks this is a great idea, and offers to return home on the pretext of caring for her mother. But Norah insists her convalescence must take place on Summer Island, at their lovely old beach house where Ruby grew up.

Perhaps being in a place so rich with happy memories – before Norah walked out – will heal the breach. Then again, it might not…

On the Railway – The great South African train story, by David Williams (Tafelberg)

When I was a student at Rhodes I would travel between Cape Town and Grahamstown by train. You could fly from Port Elizabeth, and the flight was only an hour or so, but it was expensive. The train, on the other hand, took two nights and a full day in between, but it was much cheaper. (My little sister, 14 years my junior, always flew.)

I remember the green (second class) compartments, the leather-covered benches that turned into bunks at night, the bedding attendant in khaki who would come around with bedding rolls containing blue blankets and crisp white sheets, the little basin, the gong that would be sounded up and down the corridors when dinner was served in the dining car.

David Williams was the son of an SAR & H electrician and grew up in a railway house beside the shunting yards in Escourt. He briefly worked on the railways himself.

In his foreword, former Constitutional Court judge Edwin Cameron points out the railways were central to apartheid SA’s massive project of affirmative action for whites, and was the biggest employer in the country.

“For most, it was a job for life, a necessary comfort for those many families haunted by the poverty and unemployment of the 1920s and 1930s.”

The chapter headings give a flavour of the contents: Locomotive Breath: Steam Engines; Footplate: drivers and firemen; Dinner in the Diner; Slegs Blankes: Separate but not equal; Going off the Rails: decline and fall of a great railway system.

In his acknowledgements Williams refers to his late father, Russell, adding: “Thankfully he was spared from witnessing the theft and neglect of hundreds of kilometres of overhead electrical equipment that, over a period of 40 years, he installed, repaired, maintained and inspected to keep the trains running.”

Many South Africans will have fond memories of train journeys across the country, something that doesn’t really happen anymore. If you’re one of them, this may be the book for you.

The Murder of Deveney Nel, by Julian Jansen (Tafelberg)

Last year, just two days before Women’s Day in August, 16-year-old Deveney Nel disappeared during a major sporting event at her school, Overberg High in Caledon. That’s the big school on your left as you head through Caledon on the N2 towards Swellendam.

A huge community search followed. First, her cellphone and a ribbon were found in the back of a bakkie belonging to a teacher from the adjoining primary school.

Later that evening her body was discovered in a storeroom next to the school kitchen. She had been stabbed multiple times in the neck.

Shortly after her memorial service a week later, a fellow pupil, named in this account only as Frank, 17, was arrested. He had been a previous boyfriend of Deveney’s, and his mother was due to drive Deveney and her sister, along with Frank and his brother, home to Grabouw that evening.

It later emerged Frank, then aged 13, had been apprehended for the rape of an 11-year-old girl at a campsite near Albertinia four years previously. But it appears no real action had been taken.

Judging from the first 35 pages, author Julian Jansen, a retired Cape Town-based Rapport journalist, has written a gripping account of this terrible tragedy. He is also the author of The De Zalze Murders: The story behind the brutal axe attack.

Frank is still awaiting trial.