These are among the books that landed on my desk this month. The first four are among Exclusive Books’s top reads for February. Some will be reviewed in full later. – Vivien Horler

I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again – Turning our family trauma of chemical submission into a collective fight, by Caroline Darian (Leap)

Caroline Darian, real name Caroline Peyronnet, is the daughter of Gisele Pelicot and her husband Dominique Pelicot, whose trial in Avignon for the “chemical submission” of her mother, as well as rape and trafficking, made international headlines.

Darian describes herself as bearing a double burden: she is the daughter of both the victim and her tormentor.

“For fours now, I’ve been trying to find a new way to exist. In a single instant, all the certainties that had underpinned my life were taken from me…”

Referring to her father, she says: “I have tried, without success, to unearth and understand the true identity of the man who raised me… I will never forgive him for what he did for so many years. None the less, I’m still haunted by the image of the father I thought I knew.”

On Sunday, November 1, 2020, she posted a picture of her six-year-old son Tom on Facebook, in a Covid mask which he had to wear to school the next day. Darian’s father immediately responded: “Poor little Tom. Going back to school will be a little weird this time round. Best of luck from your Grandad, who loves you more than anything.”

That was the last communication with her father. The next day he was arrested taking photographs up women’s skirts in a supermarket.

This book first appeared, in French, in 2022 and has now been translated into English. Darian has since founded the charity M’endors Pas (Stop Chemical Submission: Don’t Put Me Under) to campaign for better overall support for victims.

She writes: “What [our family] has endured has at least served to highlight a phenomenon largely underestimated in France – chemical submission is far more widespread in the familial and social sphere than anyone thought. It is the preferred weapon of sexual predators, and yet no reliable statistics exist concerning its use. In 2020, the year my father was arrested, nobody was talking about it.”

The line I took away from Gisele Pelicot’s brave decision to have an open trial was this: “The shame must be placed where it belongs.”

The Lion Women of Tehran, by Marjan Kamali  (Simon & Schuster)

It’s December 1981 and Elaheh sells perfume at an upmarket department store in Manhattan. She’s approaching 40, and her childhood in Tehran seems like a long time ago.

This was not how it was meant to be. Companions from the age of seven, Elaheh and Homa were going to by lion women, strong and free, able to work and take their place in Iranian society. But that isn’t how it turned out, neither for the girls – nor for Iran.

After years of close friendship there was a breach – an act of betrayal – for which Elaheh feels guilty. The two women have now been estranged for 17 years. And then Elaheh gets home from work one slushy December day to find a letter from Homa in Tehran. It’s friendly, chatty, asks about her life – and then ends: “Can you call me, Ellie? Please? I need to speak to you. It’s urgent.”

And Elaheh finds her life once again turning upside down.

The Last Letters from Villa Clara, by Sarah Steele (Headline Review)

This looks like a great 20^th century saga of art and love, a mysterious 1960s court case, and an ancient Tuscan villa.

It is June 1989 and Phoebe has flown from London, where she curates a tiny art museum, to her beloved uncle’s home in Tuscany. That is the place where she spent all her school holidays, in the company of dear Uncle Bruce and also Stefano, a childhood companion I fancy is going to become more than that.

Uncle Bruce has been a brilliant painter of Old Masters reproductions, and is also behind the Cato Museum of Artifice in London that Phoebe heads. But during lunch with Bruce, Phoebe realises all is not well and that her uncle, now in his 80s, has just months left to live.

It turns out there was a huge art scandal in the 1960s which got as far as the Royal Courts of Justice. Quite what happened is hard to tell, but we know Bruce agreed to a legal injunction never to spill the beans, and the court papers have not been made public.

At Bruce’s funeral Phoebe encounters a famous London art critic and dealer, Margot Stockton, part of the London art establishment Bruce hated. But it turns out he had asked her to come to his funeral, and speak to Phoebe about the old mystery.

This looks like great fun.

Buried in the Chest, by Lindani Mbunyuza-Memani (Jacana)

The title of this novel does not refer to a treasure chest, as such, but to the pain that can be buried in our hearts.

Unathi, who lives with her Gogo in a village near Dutywa, longs to know about her mother, Mavis, but Gogo will tell her nothing. Gogo Cynthia, who brought Mavis up as a single mother, is appalled when an unwed Mavis too produces a child out of wedlock. So Mavis leaves for the city.

The novel begins when Unathi is 13, shortly before the release of Tata Mandela. Things are changing in South Africa, but village life goes on much as before – without the mothers who have gone to the cities to earn money. Except the classes in the village school are bigger now, thanks to an influx of kids from the cities whose parents want them to study and have a better chance in the new South Africa than the activists burning down schools.

Then Gogo dies, and Unathi has to map a future on her own, confronting her sexuality, cultural heritage and sense of belonging.

Hailing from the Eastern Cape, Mbunyuza-Memani has a masters degree in creative writing from Southern Illinois University and a doctoral degree in mass communication and media arts. This is her first novel.

One Life – Short stories, edited by Joanne Hichens & Karina M Szczurek (Tattoo Press)

One Life is the latest in a series of local collections called Short.Sharp.Stories which have been published from time to time since 2013. This is the eighth collection, and the theme is YOLO or “you only live once”.

In her introduction Cape Town novelist Joanne Hichens says the sheer diversity of people in South Africa means we can share “truly original tales; and united by our bond of living and working in South Africa, the stories are uniquely South African”.

She says they were looking for strong narratives, fresh writing, and good language rhythm. “We want to be enthralled by character, and rooted in setting, right from the first few sentences piquing our interest and placing us in the action…”

The “you only live once” theme was tackled with guts and gusto, she says, but tended to err on the side of death rather than exhilaration.

The 20 stories reveal a variety of themes from the spiritual to romantic love, forbidden passion, motherhood, music, art and crime.

Hichens selected two stories as the editor’s choice: The Apiphatic Mountain by Jarred Thompson and Nirvana by Dan Makatile.

The final story in the collection, Immortal, by Tshidiso Moletsane, is particularly poignant in that it was penned just months before Moletsane died.

“What a loss to South African literature that this promising and sensitive young writer is tragically no more. Ironically, in Immortal, Moletsane’s narrator delivers a heart-rending eulogy for a deceased friend.”

These stories look to be well worth reading as a celebration of our South Africanness.

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.