These are among the books that landed on my desk in August 2026. Some will be reviewed in full later – Vivien Horler

Days of Miracle and Wonder – Paul Simon and the trials and triumphs of Graceland, by Ashley Kahn (White Rabbit/Jonathan Ball)

It is 40 years since Paul Simon and Ladysmith Black Mambazo, along with other artists, produced Graceland, that game-changing album that gave Simon’s post-Simon & Garfunkel career, along with that of Ladysmith Black Mambazo, a new lease of life, won a slew of Grammys and sold millions of records.

South Africa in 1985 was a very different place from today. It was a tumultuous year, at the height of the international cultural boycott targeting the country’s oppressive apartheid legislation. Yet potentially risking his superstar reputation, Simon went to Johannesburg to record with SA musicians.

And it all started with a bootleg cassette tape, recorded in Joburg, which somehow reached Simon and sparked his interest. The tape was called Gumboots: Accordion Jive Hits, Volume II. Simon wrote it had been lent to him by a friend, and “sounded vaguely like ‘50s rock’n’roll out of the Atlantic Records school of simple three-chord pop hits… It was very up, very happy music – familiar and foreign-sounding at the same time”.

In 1986, Simon was asked about the state of music, and responded that the selling process seemed more important than the creative process, “and music becomes diluted again with imitators”. A lot of the different styles of music seemed to be popular, but Simon didn’t find most of them “very interesting”.

It was the fringes that were interesting, he told Musician magazine. And Gumboots was clearly part of the fringe.

But Simon was sailing into major political controversy, of which Johnny Clegg and Sipho Mchunu’s Juluka had had a foretaste when they performed in Europe.

This looks like a great history of a ground-breaking musical movement at a time when South Africa’s tectonic plates were finally beginning to shift.

The Cauldron – The making of the modern Middle East 1900-2026, by Simon Sebag Montefiore (Weidenfeld & Nicolson/Jonathan Ball)

Since Hamas’s murderous attack on people in southern Israel in October 2023 and Israel’s wildly disproportionate response, I have been looking for some relatively balanced description of what led to the horror.

I first read A Very Short History of the Israel-Palestine Conflict by Ilan Pappe, which I found interesting, informative and nuanced.

Then there was A Short History of the Gaza Strip, by Anne Irfan, which I couldn’t review because the description of the unending persecution by the Israeli authorities of Palestinians in general and the people of Gaza in particular was just too ghastly to write about with any sense of balance.

It seemed to me the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 was truly, as Palestinians say, a nakba – a catastrophe – not just for the Middle East but, as we are finding out daily, to our current world.

Simon Sebag Montefiore’s 400-page tome (that’s not counting the maps, the end notes and the index) clearly gives a broader view, and covers a much wider geographical spread, from Egypt, Sudan and the Ottoman Empire (Turkiye) to Iran, Iraq, Israel of course, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman and the UAE.

In his introduction he writes that the Middle East is “the source of the three ‘Abrahamic religions’, the prize of empires, the bridge of continents, the path of armies, the trigger of conflicts, the well of radicalism, the font of resistance, the arena of mega powers, the cockpit of rising states, the battlefield of different versions of Islam, intra-Arab rivalries, Persian-Arab and Judo-Islamic hostilities and the laboratory of 21^st century weaponry.

“It is also the kingdom of poetry, the gateway of trade, the souk of art, the entrepot of cosmopolitanism, the reservoirs of oil, the cynosure of media, the passion-play of modern morality – and very much the epicentre of our tumultuous, rushing, interconnected world.”

He says the events of the past 30 years, even the past 80 years, are incomprehensible “without knowing what happened in the Middle East at the start of the 20^th century…”

He adds: “This region looms larger in the Western consciousness than any other, its history over the last century is more debated and contested than anywhere else, yet conversely less understood.

“Its history is fascinating, complicated, paradoxical, diverse and interwoven – and surprisingly little known. Yet is essential to know if we are to understand what is happening now, how we got here, and what will come next.”

So could this book be the definitive explanation of where we are now?

The Miseducation of South Africa – Busting myths about our biggest debates, by Dan Corder (Jonathan Ball Publishers)

I am an elderly retired journalist who gets my news from mainstream, progressive media. Dan Corder is a broadcaster, 32 years old, and clearly well informed, a man who worries about where millions of young people are getting their information from.

What I’m saying here is, I’m not this book’s target market. I was reading chapter one and thinking, yeah, yeah, we know all this stuff. Tell me something I don’t know.

But Miseducation isn’t aimed at me. It’s aimed at – probably mostly young – people who get their information from social media, and who may not have the history or the experience to say, hang on, this can’t be right.

Most South Africans don’t know enough about their own country, and this, says Corder, is a quiet crisis that is hammering us all.

“It is stifling empathy and driving us away from each other into insulated, lonely, small lives. This suffocating ignorance allows powerful elites to exploit us. It allows politicians to lie and mislead people into believing half-truths and pure untruths. They find it is easy to sell myths to get votes and evade accountability.”

He adds that the internet is increasingly a place where people create fakes and trick people into believing lies. And the education system has failed us.

If he were president for a day, Corder would make history a compulsory subject and reorganise the curriculum. Since that isn’t going to happen, he has written this book to explain where we are and what is going on.

It’s a great aim, a wonderful ambition. But will the people who get their misinformation from X and other social media pick up this book and read it?

The Sound of Ice, by Megan Choritz (Ride or Die/ Melinda Ferguson Books)

The next major wars will be over water, say the pundits, although right now the Middle East seems more likely. But this is a novel, set not far in the future, about water, its scarcity, what people are doing to protect it – and the eruption of the water wars.

The fountains in the parks are dry. Once a fancy fountain played music on special occasions, but now the empty pool is used as a skate park. Meanwhile a vast AI server on the edge of town is using huge amounts of electricity and water to keep it running. People have to buy their water from tanks and supermarkets.

With society breaking down, desperate measures are needed. Harvesting water from icebergs is cheaper than desalination plants.

Far away, near one of the frozen poles, 167 small boats have formed a ring around an iceberg to protect it. On board each boat is a mother and a daughter. Once a month they receive new supplies. For the rest they catch fish, and watch the iceberg.

Then one day the iceberg is attacked, and the water wars begin.

The blurb on the cover tells us this book “is a fierce act of imagination about trafficked bodies and stolen futures, female fury, tenderness, exile and the cost of trying to stay human when everything has turned monstrous”.

Looks intriguing.

Phantom Pass – A crime thriller by Andre M Louw (Catalyst Press)

Just after 9pm a diner leaving a restaurant near the Knysna Heads spots a small rowing boat floating in the lagoon. There seems to be an arm dangling over the side. The diner calls it in.

A pair of cops is sent out and in the boat they find a body, one that has been grotesquely mutilated. It emerges the body is that of an eminent retired advocate, a senior counsel who served a couple of stints as an acting judge in the Supreme Court.

Top Southern Cape cop Gavin Whitall of the serious crimes unit in George engages the help of a rookie detective based in George, Captain Josh Holland. Holland has had legal experience, and Whitall wants him on the team.

They explore a pretty seedy empire of gangs and drugs, with clues stretching back into the ANC’s armed struggle in the 1980s. Meanwhile the bodies are piling up.

This is a tale of greed, violence and revenge, and is apparently merely the first volume in a “duology”, according to author Andre Louw.