Author Archives: Vivien Horler

Get him to the church on time – and don’t let murder get in the way

Review: Vivien Horler

Leo, by Deon Meyer (Hodder & Stoughton)

Just over two years ago the mysterious Russian cargo ship Lady R docked in Simon’s Town. Its arrival was unexpected since it had turned off its marine tracking system somewhere near Cape Agulhas.

The ship was one of two Russian cargo ships officially sanctioned by the US for involvement in the transport of munitions to Russia to support that country’s war in Ukraine.

Lorries brought containers to Simon’s Town and,  during loadshedding on the night of December 8, 2022, the ship  was loaded in the dark. It sailed for Tanzania early on December 9.

There was enormous speculation – and public disapproval – of the incident, and to this day no satisfactory explanation has ever been made by the SA government. So what really happened?

What if a stash of gold bullion – not munititions – was loaded aboard the ship?

I have no idea how long it takes SA’s prolific and celebrated Deon Meyer to research and write one of his addictive Benny Griessel and Vaughn Cupido crime thriller novels – but maybe two years is enough? And maybe that’s exactly what happened.

Apart from the stash that was stolen…

The latest Benny and Vaughn novel opens in the bushveld, with beautiful, blonde game ranger Chrissie, who takes people on bushwalks, telling tourists what not do if they’re charged by a lion. (You don’t run, you stand your ground and make yourself look as big as possible. Apparently.)

But Chrissie has a darker side, and is about to be involved in a major heist with a group of serious ne’er do wells, including the rather fanciable Igen Rousseau. (We are never told how to pronounce the first name, but they do occasionally refer to him as Ig.)

It’s all carefully planned, but there’s a major snafu resulting in a lot of dead bodies. Chrissie takes her much diminished share of the loot and heads off to Italy.

But then Igen gets in touch again. Is she up for taking part in a big gold heist?

Meanwhile, back in Stellenbosch, Benny and Vaughn are still hoping to be sent back to the Hawks. It’s also a stressful time for Benny as he’s about to get married, and while he has no doubts about his love, marriage seems to be a big step.

Then the body of a young student, a runner, is found near a mountain trail, and Benny and Vaughn are on the case. She has nasty bites and scratches, and at first glance it looks as though she mighty have been attacked by a Cape leopard.

Except the scratches look wrong, and besides, Cape leopards are vanishingly unlikely to attack people.

The investigation leads to the Stellenbosch home of a former Recce who himself is found dead a few days later. He has been suffocated by someone spraying fast-acting filler foam down his throat.

This looks like the work of professionals who want to send a message.

Benny and Vaughn are up for it all, but then the case is mysteriously taken away from them by high-ups in the police. Something very unsavoury is going on.

You want Benny and Vaughn to beat the baddies, but some of the baddies are extremely engaging, and part of you is hoping they don’t come to too sticky an end.

I can’t say more, other than to proclaim Leo a fiendishly clever, layered, and ingewikkelde story, set in immediately identifiable Western Cape landscapes. I thought it was a great read.

And I’m not the only one – the Afrikaans version of Leo is the winner of the AKTV prize for best Afrikaans thriller of 2024.

Bedside table books for January

These are among the books that landed on my desk in January. The first five are from Exclusive Books’s top reads for the month. Some of these books will be reviewed in full later. – Vivien Horler

Fire, by John Boyne (Doubleday)

Fire is the third in John Boyne’s four novels named after the elements of Water, Earth, Fire – and Air, which is due to be published later this year. I haven’t read Earth, but thoroughly enjoyed Water, and Fire looks like a cracker, judging from the first 20 or so pages.

Freya is a beautiful, successful surgeon whose speciality is skin grafts for burn victims, but it would seem she is not a particularly nice person. A horrific experience as a child may have poisoned her life.

But the reader is asked to consider whether it did in fact poison her, or if she was always going to be that person. The book is described as a psychological journey, asking the age-old question: nurture, or nature?

Pearl, by Sian Hughes (The Indigo Press)

Not many authors have the skill or the luck or the talent to get their first novel on to the Booker Prize longlist (for 2024), but Sian Hughes has managed it, as well as being shortlisted for the Author’s Club Best First Novel Award 2024.

The Booker Prize judges described Pearl as an exceptional debut novel, both a mystery story and a meditation on grief, abandonment and consolation.

It is based on the classic medieval poem of the same name.

Marianne’s mother goes missing from their village home in Cheshire when Marianne is eight, also leaving behind her husband and infant son. Marianne believes her father knows more than he is telling.

When Marianne has her own daughter, she realises she is looking for her mother’s eyes to meet hers. “The midwife asked if there was a family history of post-partum psychosis. I said, no. Only grief. There’s a family history of grief.”

The Granddaughter, by Bernhard Schlink (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)

Kaspar is a childless elderly German bookseller who comes home from the shop one day to find his apartment in disarray, a spilt wine glass, and initially no sign of his wife. Then he finds her, dead, in the bath.

She had been troubled, for years, he understands that, but he is surprised at how unmoored he is by her death. She was originally from East Germany; they had met at a music festival in 1964, and she had joined him in West Berlin in January 1965.

But there is a great deal more to her story, of which it turns out Kaspar knows little. Determined to uncover her past, he is eventually led to a rural community of neo-Nazis, and a young girl who appears to accept him as her grandfather. Kaspar decides to fight for her.

Le Monde’s comment on this novel was: “Anyone who wants to understand contemporary Germany must read The Granddaughter now”, while Le Figaro describes it as: “The great novel of German reunification.”

Thirst, by Giles Foden (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)

If the name Giles Foden looks familiar, that’s because he is the author of the bestselling The Last King of Scotland, the novel on which the 2006 film was based, for which Forest Whitaker won an Academy Award.

This novel too is set in Africa, this time closer to home, in Namibia, in 2039.

Cat Brosnan, a young scientist is trying to find a much-needed but forgotten water source somewhere in the trackless Skeleton Coast.

Cat is not the first member of her family to seek the aquifer – her mother had also done so, abandoning her daughter in Ireland in the process, and never returning.

But Cat is not the only one. Some need the water for survival, but others are out there searching, including big corporations and mining companies. Heat, desert, water wars – sounds a bit scarily dystopian.

Cher – The memoir, part 1, by Cher (HarperCollins Publishers)

On page two Cher tells us that when she thinks of her family history it sounds like the opening of a Dickens novel (if Dickens had ever found himself in Arkansas).

“Ours was a sad, strange story of Southern folk coming from nothing and carving out a life after the Depression. It wasn’t pretty and it was never easy.”

I remember lying in bed in the dark after my bedtime, listening to the Hit Parade on my little transistor radio, singing along to Sonny and Cher’s I Got You Babe, or Let it be Me.

They were big.

Sonny Bono somehow fell by the wayside, but Cher prospered, moving on to stellar careers in music and film. According to Wikipedia she is the only solo artist with Billboard number-one singles in seven consecutive decades, from the 1960s to the 2020s. She’s 78 – so when I was listening to her on the radio, she was just 19.

She’s clever, smart, strong-willed and independent, and her movie roles reflect this.

This looks like a fun read, and there are lots of pictures – but it’s over 400 pages, and is only part 1. Goodness. Do even committed fans need more than 400 pages?

Leo, by Deon Meyer (Hodder & Stoughton)

Finally the English version of the Afrikaans police thriller of the same name, and it’s all you’d expect of Deon Meyer, Benny Griessel and Vaughn Cupido.

It’s layered, complicated and a hefty tome with some memorable characters. You’re holding thumbs for Benny and Vaughn, but also for some of the baddies – and they really are baddies – but you kind of warm to them.

And meanwhile the clock’s ticking – will Benny be in time for his wedding?

See the full review of Leo on The Books Page on Sunday February 2. Leo was listed in Exclusive Boos’s 2024 Christmas catalogue.

 

 

 

How to respond when your literary hero turns out to be an arsehole

Review: Vivien Horler

Wifedom – Mrs Orwell’s invisible life, by Anna Funder (Hamish Hamilton/Penguin)

The picture on the cover hints at the story: a half-glimpse of an attractive woman, intelligent-looking, good hair – but almost not there at all.

And if you read George Orwell, or his biographies, that would be the impression you’re left with – where is Eileen Orwell?

This book – part memoir, part fiction, and part biography – appeared in 2023 and has garnered excellent reviews. I came across it in a bookshop in Sydney’s Kingsford Smith airport – Anna Funder lives in Sydney – recognised I had read about it, and bought it. By the time I reached Cape Town, nearly 24 hours later, I had almost finished it.

It has been described variously as electrifying, brilliant, spellbinding, fascinating. I would go with all those adjectives.

It’s a look at marriage, as the title suggests, and why women, particularly clever, ambitious women, should probably have nothing to do with it. Continue reading

Food, a murder mystery and the glorious Karoo – what’s not to like?

Review: Archie Henderson

Tannie Maria and the Satanic Mechanic, by Sally Andrew (Umuzi)

Sally Andrew is annoying. How can someone have such fun when writing is so hard?

I’d heard about Tannie Maria (who hasn’t?) and half-heartedly planned to get round to reading one of the books but hadn’t. Then I picked up a copy of Pierre Steyn’s wonderful Weg! magazine. Pierre was once a most able (as many of them were and probably still are) reporter on Die Burger where he and Stephen Wrottesley of The Argus (when he wasn’t freelancing or working for the Cape Times) competed on the crime beat but were also friends. Continue reading

The laaitie who became an academic powerhouse

Review: Vivien Horler

Breaking Bread – A memoir, by Jonathan Jansen (Jonathan Ball Publishers)

If you drive down Joe Marks Boulevard in Retreat to Prince George Drive in summer, you will often see a pop-up stall selling fresh snoek.

I’ve never given the stall holders a second thought, never wondered who they are. But clearly, as this memoir by one of SA’s foremost educationalists attests, my lack of imagination is my loss.

Many years ago one of the young men selling fish on that Retreat corner for Oom Japie Solomon was Jonathan Jansen, eldest son of Abraham and Sarah Jansen of 10th Avenue. (The improbably named couple also went on, like their biblical counterparts, to have a son called Isaac.)

At the time, Jansen thought he could make “a decent living selling snoek to white people driving between the suburbs and Muizenberg”.

Then there was the possibility of a postman’s job, after he served as an assistant to a fulltime postie along the Fish Hoek line. His ambitions were modest.

But Jansen was destined for more. Continue reading

How do your find your kin when layers of secrets obscure the truth?

Review: Beryl Eichenberger

A Place to Hide – a novel, by Ronald H Balson (St Martin’s Press)

Identity. A word on so many lips today – something more tangible than ever with the movement of people across the planet, with the plight of refugees and of course, those who survived World War II.

For the European Jews who lived to see May 1945, finding their kin was like looking for a needle in a haystack. Where did they start?

For many it was to find and uncover family secrets that included siblings who had been adopted – hidden in plain sight from the viciousness of Nazism.  The taking on of a new identity, new religion, new families saved many lives but for those who came looking for them post war – many were lost. Continue reading

Back home after the war, the battle was just beginning

Review: Vivien Horler

The Women – a novel, by Kristin Hannah (Macmillan)

In November 1993, almost 10 years after the end of the Vietnam war, a bronze statue was unveiled in Washington DC to commemorate the contribution of the 10 000 enlisted American women who served in South-East Asia.

Around 90% of them were nurses, while others were in air traffic control, military intelligence and in administration.

The nursing work on the front line was brutal, and the wounds, both physical and psychological they and their surgeon partners had to deal with, were horrendous.

Yet for years the American public was able to ignore, or even deny, that US military personnel were in Vietnam. And if that was the case for men, it was even more so for women. In many cases broader America flatly rejected the notion any American women were in Vietnam at all. Continue reading

Growing up amid “a trinity of chaos”

Review: Vivien Horler

Matriarchs, Meze and the Evil Eye – A memoir, by Costa Ayiotis (Melinda Ferguson)

The family in which Costa Ayiotis grew up in Kempton Park was not your average nuclear one. Yes, his mum, dad and little sister were there, but so was his dad’s mum, and his aunt.

His mum, Victoria, always knew her mother-in-law would be part of the marriage. Before they tied the knot in Egypt – the family were Egyptian Greeks, originally from Cyprus – fiance Stelios told her: “Victoria, my love, before we get married, you need to know that I am obliged to take care of my mother. That is my only request and condition. It’s my sacred duty as a son.”

And he added: “If you want to make your life easier, leave the kitchen to her and everything will be fine.”

It didn’t end there. Some time after the family had emigrated to SA, Stelios dropped a different bombshell. His sister Mary’s marriage to an Irish diplomat had ended, and not long after she decided she too would come to SA to be close to her mother, and to little Costa, her godson. Continue reading

There had been loss before, but this stopped her cold

Review: Vivien Horler

Fi, by Alexandra Fuller (Jonathan Cape)

In July 2018 times were rough for acclaimed author Alexandra Fuller. Her marriage was over, and so was the relationship with a glassblower with whom she had lived in a yurt in a Wyoming meadow.

Now she was moving into a tiny and stuffy condo which was all she could afford.

She was also breaking up with a young woman, Till, whom she described as “a severe weather advisory of her own” involving drugs and depression.

Her beloved father had recently died, and she was estranged from her mother and sister, because of things she had written about them in previous memoirs. She also longed for the country of her birth, Zimbabwe, the wild and war-torn country she had known as a child

But on the plus side, there was her confidence in her own agency and options, and joy centred on her three children, Sarah and Fuller, who were at college, and Cecily who was still at school. Continue reading

Christmas Books

 

If you’re thinking of books as a summer holiday read or as Christmas gifts, there’s an embarrassment of riches out there. It could mean a one-stop shopping expedition, which is always a pleasure at this busy time.

Exclusive Books has produced its annual festive catalogue, Get in their Good Books, which is clever. Here are brief descriptions of some of the books they’ve posted, and at the end a reference to other books in the catalogue that have already been featured on The Books Page.

The top two books on my Christmas list are gorgeous picture books which also contain a wealth of information. Many Makhanda residents who have gone without water for months fear they face a dry Christmas. – Vivien Horler

Wood, Iron and Steel – Shipwrecks mapped off the Western Cape, by Bruce Henderson & Kelly Graham (Wreckless Marine/ Quickfox Publishing)

The arresting cover picture of this book is a multibeam image of the bulk carrier Daeyang Family, which ran aground off Robben Island in March 1986. The ship was carrying a cargo of iron ore from Brazil to its home port of Incheon in South Korea. The 28-member crew was helicoptered to safety.

This book features 60 shipwrecks dating from 1698 to 2009, including wooden sailing ships trading between Europe and the East, iron-hulled steamers and modern steel vessels.

As the blurb tells us: “Every wreck had a life before it was lost, and every loss is a tale of its own.”

Wreckless Marine is a Cape Town company that has worked closely with the Council for Geoscience SA’s minerals and energy unit, as well as the SA Heritage Resources Agency’s Maritime and Underwater Cultural Heritage.

The wrecks were surveyed over three years as part of a project to map the Western Cape’s seafloor. “Cutting-edge scanning technology enables us to view them as never before, while on-site dives and extensive research have added to what is known about each vessel.”

In his introduction, Cape Town author and shipping journalist Brian Ingpen gives a timeline of relevant dates in the Cape shipping industry, from circa 600 BC when the Phoenicians may have been the first navigators to round the Cape, to the sinking of the Seli 1 in 2009.

Many Cape Town readers will remember the sinking of the SA Seafarer off Green Point on 1966, the Antipolis and Romelia off Oudekraal and Llandudno respectively on the same stormy night in 1977, the Daeyang Family off Robben Island in 1986, and the Treasure in 2000 north of Robben Island, which led to an enormous penguin rescue effort.

Each entry about the 60 wrecks features pictures where they exist, details of the ship and its loss, dive pictures of the wreck and also the somewhat surreal multibeam images of the wrecks in situ.

Kirstenbosch – The most beautiful Garden in Africa (2nd edition), by Brian J Huntley (Struik Nature/ Penguin Random House)

As we all know, Scotland is famous for its heathers.

But we who live in the Cape Floral Kingdom say pah! As this magnificent volume tells us, six species of heather grow “in the much-romanticised heathlands of Scotland”. On the Cape Peninsula – just the peninsula – we have 104.

Ericas are one of the three major fynbos families – the others are restios and proteas – and there are 816 species globally. Fynbos has 682 of them.

Kirstenbosch tells the story of the garden from the earliest years, its history, its people, its setbacks (there’ve been a few). And the book is magnificently illustrated with eye-wateringly beautiful photographs.

In the late 19th century it was felt the Cape needed its own botanical garden, and the first site suggested was, logically, the Company’s Garden in the city centre. But apparently it was on the wrong side of the mountain, and constrained by the growing city.

Brian J Huntley, first CEO of the National Botanical Institute at Kirstenbosch, spent 19 years in the garden. He writes that in 1911, Henry Harold Welch Pearson, professor of botany at the SA College (later to become the University of Cape Town) and some like-minded chaps were looking for a spot for the garden. He had in mind somewhere on the slopes south of the old Groote Schuur zoo.

But they carried on hiking, heading through the avenue of Moreton Bay figs and camphor trees planted by Cecil John Rhodes, “and reached the site that became, and remains, the iconic point of entry into Kirstenbosch – the verdant sweep rising to the grandeur of Castle Rock, flanked by the rugged, forested eastern face of the Table Mountain massif. Pearson exclaimed: “This is the place.”

Anyone attending a Kirstenbosch summer concert on a late Sunday afternoon, their gaze lifting from the stage to the mountain on their left, knows he was right.

Nomad Heart – Adventures on and off the set, by Ian Roberts (Jonathan Ball)

I’d never heard of actor and musician Ian Roberts, until I realised he was the guy in the Castrol oil ads set at the Karoo Oasis. We’ve all seen them. But he’s probably more famous for his role as Sloet Steenkamp in the long-running series Arende, a series I’d never watched and had no idea was set in a prisoner-of-war camp ion the island of St Helena during the Boer War.

And now I’m sorry I’ve never seen it since I’ve been to St Helena and visited the beautiful, peaceful Boer cemetery there.

Roberts and his siblings grew up on an orange farm in the Eastern Cape, running wild in the holidays and attending school at posh St Andrews in what was then Grahamstown.

After the army and a stint as a clothing manager in what was then PE, he enrolled as a speech and drama student at Rhodes.

He’s acted in venues from Long Street to Los Angeles and has been in Shakespeare plays as well as films, such as the Oscar-winning Tsotsi.

It’s been a long and interesting career in music and the stage, and now it turns out he can write, too, with delicious spurts of humour.

Run. Risk. Reward. – My epic trail-running adventures, by Ryan Sandes, with Steve Smith (Penguin)

Ryan Sandes is a legend, a national treasure. I first heard of him in 2010 when he became the first runner to have won all four of the 4 Desert races, which are six-to-seven-day self-supported races through various deserts including the Sahara and the Antarctic.

The following year he comfortably won the Leadville Trail 100 in just 16:46:54, half an hour ahead of the next competitor and nearly eight hours ahead of the cut-off time. This race resonated with me because the following year I went to Leadville, which is so high up in the Colorado Rockies that these days they try not to allow to have babies born there, because the atmosphere is so thin.

I was interested because I was researching some family history and both my grandmother and her sister were born in Leadville in the 1880s – and survived. At 3 096m above sea level, even walking up a slight incline in the road made me breathless.

What Sandes did in the Leadville 100 was run 100 miles (160km) in the mountains above Leadville, with a course that takes you up and over a mountain, and then back, all within 24 hours. You start in the dark and end in the dark.

The story of this astonishing feat was told in Trailblazer, also co-authored by Steve Smith in 2016.

Now Sandes and Smith have a new volume, and this one opens with Sandes and his running partner Ryno Griesel on an epic marathon across Nepal, being hunted by bandits. Later while running 700km up Namibia’s Skeleton Coast, he encountered some very grumpy Namibian soldiers, and then there was the time, running the circumference of Lesotho with Griesel, they had to fight off an attack from local herdsmen.

Maybe this book should have been called Running for My Life.

The feats and tests – including Covid – contained in this volume look sure to be as extraordinary as those recounted in Trailblazer.

The Housefly Effect – How nudge psychology steers your everyday behaviour, by Eva van den Broek & Tim den Heijer (Bedford Square Publishers)

A wise old fisherman friend once told me while geelbek is a popular menu choice for Afrikaans speakers, English speakers tended to shun it. Until it was renamed, in English, Cape Salmon. And then it became popular with everyone.

I don’t know how true that is – I tried to Google it and didn’t find anything – but it matches what the Dutch authors of this fascinating book say in their introduction:  “When you give a fish a different name, people suddenly eat far more of it.”

This is all part of what has been dubbed “the housefly effect”, a small change in the environment that makes desired behaviour easier, more fun, or the obvious choice.

This book introduces the reader to many “houseflies”, like the sweets that line the supermarket till queues in an effort to prompt you to make an impulse buy, to those that help you drive more safely or live more healthily.

In a reference to gambling “houseflies”, the authors point out you swop your cash for chips in a casino not for security reasons, but because using chips means you don’t feel the pain of spending real money. Also you’ll see people around you winning, because the more prominently a slot machine is positioned, the more often it delivers a modest prize.

Sneaky. But it looks as though this title is bristling with insights.

I Will Not Be Silenced, by Karyn Maughan (Tafelberg)

This memoir tells us Karyn Maughan was 12 when she first knew she wanted to be a journalist. And she was determined.

I don’t remember the year, but fresh from a media studies and journalism master’s, she approached the Cape Argus news desk and asked if she could report for us, for free.

This was at a time when there was a determined effort to “transform” what had been an almost entirely white newsroom to one more reflective of the diverse population. That meant it became difficult to take on aspirant white reporters.

But the general attitude was that if she wanted to write for us, for free, well that was okay.

It soon became apparent to me – I was news editor at the time – that she was good. In some cases she was better than staff reporters and interns who were earning a salary. After a couple of months I went to the editor and said this was unconscionable – we at least needed to pay her lineage (payment per published line).

Eventually she was taken on full-time, for a proper salary. And her career was launched.

I tell this story to indicate something about Karyn’s determination. She wanted it, she could do it, and she succeeded.

So when she says, as she does in the title of her book: “I will not be silenced,” believe her.

Karyn became the Argus’s high court reporter, which she says she loved. And then she transferred to The Star, and in 2006 reported on Jacob Zuma’s rape trial. She was not to know this would be the start of 20 years reporting about Zuma’s legal problems, which eventually became her own as Zuma turned on her and state advocate Billy Downer.

Karyn writes: “I witnessed, again and again, how Zuma and his supporters viciously targeted anyone who sought to hold him accountable for his conduct… This is not only my story, and the reason I’m writing it is not just personal; it is also to honour all those who were targeted for speaking up long before I was.”

As Zuma has possibly already realised: Karyn Maughan is no push-over.

The Hidden Girl –  A novel – by Lucinda Riley (Macmillan)

Even as a young girl growing up on the Yorkshire moors in the mid-1970s, Leah is unusually attractive. And when she catches the attention of an arty neighbouring family, her life changes.

She becomes a top international model, but it turns out she has a past, involving the tragic tale of two young siblings in Poland in World War 2.

Her family’s secrets threaten to overwhelm her life, and she is reminded of a prediction by an old woman, regarded by the neighbourhood kids as a witch, who told her there was evil ahead of her, a doomed man who would come to find her on the moors. “You must be on your guard,” she tells the terrified child.

This hefty novel – more than 500 pages – also has a past. It is described as an international bestseller, yet has only just been published. Lucinda Riley’s son Harry Whittaker tells us in a foreword that The Hidden Girl was originally published under the title Hidden Beauty by Riley, then calling herself Lucinda Edmonds, in 1993, when she was just 26.

Her writing career had a hiccup in the late 1990s, and she died in 2021. When Whittaker read Hidden Beauty for the first time, he says he was enormously impressed. It was about thwarted ambition and forbidden love, revenge and murder, culminating in a fatal, forgotten prophecy.

So Whittaker decided to refresh and update the 1993 text, his duty being to “modernise perspectives and sensibilities without ripping out the heart of the novel”.

It looks promising, although Riley/Edmonds’s prose is a bit too adjective-heavy for me: “Rose Delancey dropped her fine sable brush into the jar of turpentine. She put down her palette on the paint-spattered workbench, and sank into the threadbare armchair, pushing her heavy titian hair away from her face…”

What Nelson Mandela Taught Me – Timeless lessons on leadership and life, by Zelda la Grange (Tafelberg)

It must have been tough, after 19 years spent largely devoting her life to Nelson Mandela as private secretary and aid, to have seen him go. Suddenly her raison d’etre was gone, along with her more-than-fulltime job. Not surprisingly she wrote what turned out to be a bestseller about her years with the leader, Good Morning, Mr Mandela.

And now she has written a second book, as well as making a living giving talks about him. She’s rather milking this, I thought, when I saw the book. But hey, she probably spent more time than anyone else with Madiba in those 19 years and clearly feels she still has something to say.

This volume however opens with an error of judgment for which she has beaten herself up. In January 2015 she flew to the UK to give a TEDx talk in Oxford, and while waiting, sleep-starved in an immigration queue at Heathrow, she fired off a series of tweets focusing on remarks by Jacob Zuma. She commented that whites were no longer wanted in South Africa, and that if she were a white investor she would withdraw her money. She added: “Oh wait. Whites’ tax is good enough for Nkandla but then you constantly have to be brutalised.”

Well, a bit like Helen Zille and her colonisation tweets, La Grange’s remarks  set off a firestorm. Unlike Zille, she was quickly mortified by what she’d said, especially when some people asked her: “Have you learnt nothing from Nelson Mandela?”

She realised she had of course, including the advice that you never respond in anger.

And so here is a volume of some life lessons. In the little I’ve read I found it somewhat on the preachy side: “What do you want to be known for? Being an angry, bitter person who can’t adapt to change, or someone who is willing to give up a little for the sake of the greater good?

“We should all do things we know we can do. Give your thoughts wings and interrogate your cognitive bias. The thing is, everyone belongs. It is what made Madiba so loved. He made us all belong…”

I think this will resonate with many people.

Matriarchs, Meze and the Evil Eye – A memoir, by Costa Ayiotis (Melinda Ferguson)

Having detailed his venture into the restaurant business – the late lamented Limonia in Hout Bay –  in his first book, My Big Fat Greek Taverna, he has now written a prequel memoir about growing up in what he calls “a trinity of chaos” – a South African home containing his mother, his Greek-Egyptian grandmother and his aunt.

His father was nominally there too, but he was mostly away on business. The focus of the family was little Kostaki, the prince, who was beloved by all three women.

The problem was that “giving three strong-willed and independently minded women free rein in … a busy household kitchen is courting disaster. We were your average dysfunctional family with one added ingredient: three women who all wanted to be the prima donna.”

He loved them equally, he says, but life wasn’t easy. “On a good day, they were a triumvirate of benevolent volatility. On a bad day, they were a trinity of chaos.”

This looks hilarious.

Crimson Sands – A novel, by Jeremy Vearey (Human & Rousseau)

The Bondelswarts are a Nama ethnic group, today based in southern Namibia, but at the time this epic historical novel begins in 1905 the group straddled the territory on both sides of the Orange River.

The Bondelswarts rose up against the Germans in SWA between 1903 and 1906, and were brutally suppressed. About 15 years later, when South Africa had a mandate from the League of Nations to govern SWA, the Bondelswarts rose up again, in a fight thought to have been sparked by an increase in the dog tax.

Once again the Bondelswarts were crushed, with the deaths of around 100 Bondelswarts, including some women and children.

Wikipedia says the activist and scholar Ruth First, herself murdered in Mozambique by the apartheid government many years later, described the attack on the Bondelswarts, which included an aircraft sent to bomb them, as “the Sharpeville of the 1920s”.

This is the historical background of Crimson Sands, by the respected/notorious former policeman Jeremy Vearey, and focuses on Dirk Aruseb, a teenager who is fetched from an orphanage in Pella in the Northern Cape to join the Bondelswarts.

Dirk was always on his own, known in his orphanage as the Bosluis Baster for his straw-coloured peppercorns and grey eyes. But now he has a cause, to fight the German Schutztruppe, and he is taught the mechanics of war in the Bondelswarts’ stronghold at Schansvlakte in the Great Kara ountains of Namaland.

The cover describes Crimson Sands as an epic story of war across territories from Tsumeb to Upington, from internment camps in Luderitzbucht to the Fish River Canyon.

(This novel is not included in Exclusive Books’s Christmas catalogue)

The Books Page has in previous months featured a number of other books included in Exclusive Books’s Christmas catalogue, such as:

  • The brilliant The Glass Maker, by Tracy Chevalier, about the history of Venetian glass;
  • The gripping thriller Fire and Bones by forensic anthropologist Kathy Reichs;
  • Exit Wounds, Peter Godwin’s memoir of his mother’s death and his life’s slump;
  • A Short Life, a novel by Nicky Greenwall, the strange story of two car accidents on Constantia Nek on the same night, and how they change lives;
  • The family epic The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese set in Kera Kerala, India.