These are among the books that landed on my desk in September. Some will be reviewed in full later. Two of them – Wolf Hour by Jo Nesbo, and One Night in Paris by Nina George – are among Exclusive Books’ top reads for the month. – Vivien Horler

Malema: Money. Power. Patronage, by Micah Reddy and Pauli van Wyk (Tafelberg)

The authors, whose investigating journalistic credentials are impeccable, proclaim in the first line of their prologue that this is not a biography of Julius Malema.

In fact, after writing a number of what they call unflattering articles about the Economic Freedom Fighters, amaBhungane Centre for Investigative Journalism (Micah Reddy) and Daily Maverick (Pauli van Wyk) were banned from covering its events. The writers were labelled “agents of Stratcom”.

The authors have not interviewed Malema, and people who are close to him won’t speak to them. However, they have amassed enough information to fill more than 300 pages, and it looks like pretty damning stuff.

In the prologue they tell one brief story as an example of how the EFF “has been moulded around private interests”.

Malema’s friend and benefactor Matome Hlabioa became ill with cancer and died in May 2015. While he was being treated, Malema offered Hlabioa’s wife, Marubini, an EFF parliamentary seat so she could access the government medical aid.

“She had no political experiences and declined the offer, but it shows how Malema views the EFF as his own fiefdom – a vehicle for dispensing patronage. A seat in parliament with a salary of R1million and various perks became a means of honouring his personal obligations to the widow of his deceased friend.”

Yoh. And that’s almost certainly the least of it.

Daily Glimmers: The art of finding tiny joys every day of the year, by Bridget McNulty (Penguin)

If you find embedded corruption and the shenanigans of the likes of Julius Malema and others depressing, Glimmers might just provide an antidote.

Bridget McNulty is the co-founder of Sweet Life, SA’s largest online diabetes community. She defines “glimmers” as little slices of joy, tiny noticings, specific to you, that cheer you up.

She writes: “The concept is simple: instead of waiting for The Next Big Thing to make you happy – a holiday, a life partner, a promotion, a child – you look out for three-second moments in your everyday life that make you smile.”

Joy isn’t happiness or contentment – it’s accessible even in the darkest moments, if you’re up to looking for it.

The book will tell you how to notice glimmers “…it’s a practical, useful way to start feeling better about your life, no matter what it looks like right now”.

Here are a handful of glimmers: a cutting from a friend’s garden, the burble of a stream, writing with a lovely pen, turning the music up loud, a hug, an absorbing book, taking a happy dog for a walk on the beach…

The Invisible Boy from Bramble Way, by Anwar McKay (Southern Right Publishers)

You might not have heard of Anwar McKay, who grew up in Bonteheuwel, but you’ve probably heard of his husband, the comedian Marc Lottering.

McKay writes that he was a 12-year-old, effeminate Muslim boy from working-class Bontehewel, living in a hate-filled Calvinistic apartheid South Africa.

In a foreword, journalist and writer Marianne Thamm asks: “How does a sensitive and talented boy find a way through a ruthlessly macho world, populated by men who might be gang members, or inclined to beat up or taunt anyone viewed as effeminate?”

By becoming invisible, that’s how.

But McKay certainly hasn’t stayed invisible. He is now a distinguished theatre producer and director, and credits his mother, Tyra, who gave him unconditional love, and Lottering, “who loved and adored me when I felt most unlovable and invisible”.

Love and courage are behind this remarkable story of growing up different on the Cape Flats.

One Night in Paris, by Nina George (Michael Joseph)

Claire Cousteau is a French biologist with what appears to be a wonderful family life. But she has become increasingly frustrated by her marriage, and the fact her husband routinely has affairs.

So she starts having affairs too – well, casual sexual encounters with strangers.

Leaving a hotel room one afternoon, she comes across a young hotel cleaner, a woman, singing the Jacques Brel song Ne me quitte pas. The woman has a pierced eyebrow and tattoos on her left arm.

But what strikes Claire is the woman’s “old dark gaze out of young eyes”. Claire feels suddenly exposed, as though the cleaner knows exactly what she’s been doing. She resists the compulsion to say: “Because he looked at me, do you understand? Because he looked at me the whole time and didn’t close his eyes.”

The women stare at each other, and eventually turn away.

Now it’s the beginning of the holidays and Claire and her family are off to Breton. Her son asks her if he can bring his new girlfriend.

Of course says Claire. And the girlfriend turns out to be the young hotel cleaner.

“Sensual, provocative, and stirring, One Night in Paris is a story of becoming who you were meant to be by breaking apart things you’ve always known,” the cover tells us.

Wolf Hour, by Jo Nesbo (Harvill Secker)

It’s September 2022 and Holger Rudi arrives in Minneapolis from Oslo to do research on the true crime novel – The Minneapolis Avenger – he’s writing. True crime is the hottest genre in the book market right now, he muses on the drive in from the airport. People just can’t get enough of stories about bloody and preferably spectacular murders.

He’s interested in a series of killings that took place in the city in 2016. They started with the shooting of a small-time crook in the streets, and it seems the sniper was a lone wolf.

A detective called Bob Oz is assigned to the case when the shooter strikes again. The authorities believe this second victim won’t be the last.

And they’re right.

The cover blub tells us: “Wolf Hour is a gritty standalone thriller packed with unexpected twists, dark secrets and bubbling personal and political tension, from the king of the cliffhanger.”

Hell of a Country, by David Cornwell (Kwela)

Talking of true crime stories, here is one. In 1974 a young woman called Marlene Lehnberg, who lived in a boarding house in Rondebosch, instigated and took part in the murder of her lover’s wife, a woman called Susanna Magdalena van der Linde.

It became the famous Scissors Murder case. This book is a fictionalised version.

Lehnberg, who was 18 at the time, was convicted and sentenced to death, along with her co-accused, an amputee called Marthinus Choegoe, who was supposed to carry out the murder but chickened out several times.

Eventually Lehnberg and Choegoe went into the Van der Linde house. Lehnberg pistol-whipped Van der Linde, who fell down. Choegoe then stabbed her to death with a pair of her own scissors.

Both Lehnberg and Choegoe’s death sentences were remitted.

I’m familiar with this story because about three or four weeks before the murder I met Lehnberg, by chance, in her boarding house, where my boyfriend’s brother was staying.

I was astonished by her, as she leaned against the desk in the room, filing her nails and telling us she wished her boss-lover’s wife would just drop dead. “I told him, and I meant it.”

She also said she was about to leave Cape Town for Joburg in her car: “I got a Anglia and it goes, hey!”

Then the murder story broke – and the victim was Lhenberg’s lover’s wife.

We’ll see how this book goes.

 

These are among the books that landed on my desk in August. Some of them will be reviewed in full later. – Vivien Horler

The Shadow State – Why Babita Deokaran had to die, by Jeff Wicks (Tafelberg)

Just a cursory read of the opening pages of this book is enough to enrage one. Within a very brief period of the acting CFO and whistleblower of the Gauteng Health Department being shot in her car outside her home early on August 23, 2021, the crime scene had been abandoned.

In fact, writes prize-winning author and News24 investigative journalist Jeff Wicks, the police left the crime scene around the same time the ambulance taking Deokaran to hospital. Her bloody, bullet-riddled car was abandoned in the street where it had come to a stop, her handbag, cellphone and laptop were inside it. There was no crime-scene tape securing the area.

Later that day Deokaran’s brother moved the car into her garage (he didn’t want her 16-year-old daughter to see it) and removed the handbag and devices.

It was at sunset, hours later, when senior detectives from Gauteng’s Serious and Violent Crimes Unit arrived, and did what police are supposed to do. And then, just days later, the Hawks took over the investigation – “someone with a lot more brass on their shoulders had pulled rank”, writes Wicks.

Then the Hawks proceeded to do nothing, too.

This book looks fascinating but enfuriating.

Confessor Cop – The detective who persuaded killers to talk, by Captain Jonathan Morris, as told to Michael Behr (Kwela)

It’s pretty handy when you, as a Serious and Violent Crimes cop, have a gift: you can persuade killers to confess. This is a book about one such cop, Captain Jonathan Morris of Mitchell’s Plain, who has an impressive record of solving crimes behind him.

Author Michael Behr writes: “this is a true story, although at times it doesn’t seem like it. At times it seems like a nightmare. The cop’s nightmare. His trauma… How he suppressed it to do his job. How it got him in the end. It’s a story about his cop life, and his home life, his wives, his children, his mother.

“…he’s a man with a story. It’s a story about what cops have to deal with daily, serious stuff that is something difficult to read. Stuff like this…”

And Behr launches into the Sizzlers’s case, the gay massage parlour in Sea Point attacked by murderers in January 2003.

Two handguns were used to shoot nine terrified rent boys in the back of the head. One who refused to lie on his stomach was shot in the face. Kitchen knives were then used to slit their throats. There were four survivors, but within hours three had died.

There was one precious survivor who might be able to tell detectives what happened.

Eish.

A History of the World in Six Plagues – How contagion, class and captivity shape us, from cholera to Covid-19, by Edna Bonhomme (Dialogue Books)

I used to be a health reporter, and I loved it. I loved the way the beat provided three different types and sources of stories: science and advances in medicine; human stories of suffering and triumph (and occasionally the opposite); and then the political – were the budgets adequate, were there enough medical personnel, and so forth.

So I leapt on this book with enthusiasm. The plagues listed are cholera, human trypanosomiasis or sleeping sickness, Spanish flu, HIV/Aids, Ebola and Covid.

But the book is less of an exploration of various waves of disease that have swept the world and more a musing on how they – and the policies used to fight them – have affected black bodies.

The book’s subtitle sums up the contents, with captivity taking various forms, such as slavery in the plantations of America’s south – where cholera was a recurring problem – as well as quarantine and lockdowns.

Edna Bonhomme, who grew up in Miami, is of Haitian descent, and describes her indignation as a young woman when HIV/Aids was first identified in 1982. The authoritative US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention listed four supposed groups as a “high risk” for contracting or transmitting the syndrome: homosexuals, heroin users, haemophiliacs and Haitians.

She writes: “Haitians were the only members of the ‘4H club’ included on the basis of their nationality. As a consequence they and their US-born children were denied housing and employment. Working class Haitians found themselves marginalised four times over: They were Black…; they were poor; they were migrants; they were marked out as diseased.”

A page or two later she writes: “Yet we Haitians were hardly the first groups of people to be blamed or stigmatised over an epidemic. This book is a journey towards understanding how disease management is influenced by how society defines humanity.”

I think this book, while offering some profound truths, will not be an easy read.