Some gorgeous, contemplative, interesting and utterly readable books have landed on my desk in the past few weeks, and a brief description of them makes a fitting end to The Books Page for 2025. The whole family is arriving for Christmas, some from Australia, two from the UK, and I know from experience not much reading gets done. So I wish all followers of The Books Page a blessed Christmas, a fabulous holiday season, and a wonderful, healthy and happy new year. Regular weekly reviews will resume on January 11(unless inspiration strikes before then!) – Vivien Horler

A Guide to Wild Swimming in the Western Cape – Explore 101 of the region’s most beautiful swimming spots, by Serai Dowling & Matthew Dowling (Rockhopper Books)

Serai Dowling, author of the bestseller A Guide to Tidal Pools of the Western Cape, and her husband Matthew have expanded the concept of the first book to include more general gorgeous places to swim, from sea coves and beaches to rivers, mountain pools and even dams.

Like the first book the text is accompanied by glorious photographs designed to get you out into nature.  And even if you’re not lucky enough to live in the Western Cape, you can exult in the places the Dowlings uncover from the comfort of your armchair, and start planning your holiday.

The authors point out that wild swimming is not to be confused with adventure swimming or “open water” swimming, although they can overlap. Wild swimming takes place in beautiful spots and allows the swimmer to embrace the joy of natural waters and serene places.

Adventure swimming tends to push the swimmer, mentally and physically through challenging environments, while “open water” swimming tends to be competitive with a set distance and speed.

On the other hand, the experience of wild swimming “lies in soaking yourself in a fully living ecosystem exposed to wind, weather, water creatures, shifting light and the contours of the land. It means being vulnerable and attentive”.

In her preface Serai Dowling says her swims represent “rituals of connection to land, to history… I have witnessed how wild swimming can soften grief, build community and restore a sense of wholeness”.

Dining with Elephants: French cuisine. African journey. Wild Inspiration, by Francoise Malby-Anthony

Francoise Malby-Anthony is the widow of the conservationist and best-selling author Lawrence Anthony (author of The Elephant Whisperer), and they founded the glorious Tula Tula wildlife reserve in KwaZulu-Natal in 1998.

Malby-Anthony continues to run the reserve today, surrounded by the (usually) gentle giants that both husband and wife have written about before.

This new volume is part memoir, part cookbook and part celebration of living close to nature, or as Malby-Anthony puts it – “we live with nature, not on top of it. This cookbook is a celebration… of the elephants. Of the wild. Of the food.”

Malby-Anthony may have been born in France, with its rich culinary heritage, but this book goes further, to celebrate great food with an African twist. And things are not easy, since Tula-Tula is in the bush, 25km from the nearest supermarket.

Breakfast offerings include scrambled eggs and biltong on potato rosti, as well as pumpkin and Malva pudding rusks. Soups include exotic fruit gazpacho with Amarula, and chilled tomato and basil soup with avocado sorbet.

There are splendid entrees, seafood recipes, cassoulets and sweets that, judging from the pictures, are to die for.

And interspersed among all this are stories about life at Tula Tula, the day the matriarch elephant raided the boma, what happened to the vegetable and herb garden (elephants again), the wedding at which Malby-Anthony served what she thought was would dazzle the guests: crocodile vol-au-vents topped with a chocolate and chili sauce. The wedding MC described it as “memorable” and she adds: “I don’t think it was a compliment.”

Then there was the time her chef confused habanero chillies with peppadews in the tomato soup.

This looks like a delightful book.

A Short History of Nearly Everything 2.0 – Fully revised and updated, by Bill Bryson (Doubleday)

A shout from the Economist on the cover of this weighty tome says: “This book is possibly the best scientific primer ever published.”

It turns out in the 20 years or so since version one was published, a lot has changed, and so the Short History has needed revision. For instance, this version explains to us why Pluto is no longer a planet; how the number of moons in the solar system has more than doubled in 20 years; how scientists have used advances in genetics to discover previously unknown species of early humans; why we still don’t know what most of the universe is made of; and how the little Biggs boson transformed physics.

Bryson is an extraordinary writer who has never allowed himself to be typecast. The first Bryson book I owned was Troublesome Words, written when he was a lowly sub-editor on The Times of London.

Then there were the hilarious travel books, of which my favourite remains Down Under, although Notes from a Small Island made me laugh out loud. Subsequent subjects have been science, the fascinating At Home, about the history of everyday objects in his home in Norfolk, and most recently The Body, an owner’s manual.

He explains in his introduction to Secret History 2.0 how as an elementary school pupil in the US in the 1950s he was struck by a diagram of the planet Earth, which explained the various layers, from the crust to the upper and lower mantles, the liquid outer core and the burning hot inner core of iron and nickel.

He remembers thinking, in wonder: “How do they know that?” He was to discover, in years of school science education, the answer to that question was rarely given.

“How do they know what goes on inside an atom? And how, come to that…can scientists so often seem to know nearly everything but then still not be able to predict an earthquake or even tell us whether we should take an umbrella to the races next Wednesday?”

So he has devoted five years of his life to finding out.

• This is one of Exclusive Books top reads for the summer holidays.

Lessons from my Father, compiled by Steve Anderson & Melinda Ferguson (Melinda Ferguson Books)

Some South African leading lights have contributed to this book, all speaking of the importance of their fathers in their lives. They include Proteas cricket captain Temba Bavuma, former Springbok rugby coach Nick Mallett, Gift of the Givers founder Imtiaz Sooliman, author and publisher Joanne Hichens, Olympic gold medallist swimmer Chad le Clos and a score of others.

In an introduction editor Steve Anderson says in a country where gender-based violence by men against women is rife, many people believe the lack of a supportive fatherly figure is a major contributing factor.

This book looks at people whose fathers did play a supportive role, and what these fathers taught their children. Anderson writes: “My sincere hope … is that some of the many gems of good fathering on these pages will make a difference to even just one father, or father-to-be, and thereby to his family.”

The first contribution I read was that by Temba Bavuma, partly because for years I worked with his father, Vuyo Bavuma, at the Cape Argus and Weekend Argus. Vuyo certainly had a way of coming up with great stories almost unheard of in what in those days were largely white newsrooms catering mainly to white readers.

Temba says he’s often been asked if his dad helped helped in the development of his batting technique. No to that says Temba firmly, but in a wider sense Vuyo “taught me things that have benefited me enormously, not only in my cricket, but in my broader life”.

He tells a story of how Vuyo taught him to deal with setbacks. Temba was playing for the Under 14A team at school and expected to be selected for the Gauteng Under 15 team. But when the team was announced, Temba’s name wasn’t called.

He was devastated. He had had a good season and had made lots of runs. He writes: “It wasn’t hard to see that I was broken.”

When father and son got home from the announcement, Vuyo handed his son a pen and paper and said: “Right, Temba, this is how we are going to go through this. Where do you think you can improve? In your batting, your fitness, your bowling, your fielding?”

They went through the list, and Temba wrote down what had been identified. “Then we listed actionable steps as to how I could improve on each point I’d noticed.

“I’ve become big on that approach: deal with the hardships; deal with the challenges. Try not to dwell on the emotional side of things, but rather plan and then focus on the practical aspects of how to move forward.”

I was struck by both Temba and Nick Mallett’s fathers’ attitude to their wives.

Temba writes: “Dad respects Mom’s views. If there’s an issue that has to be decided on, he doesn’t make a unilateral decision. It’s a collective ‘team’ process. In many families, especially in African culture, it’s most often the man who will consider the matter at hand and then make an ‘executive’ decision… My dad is very seldom like that.”

Mallett, in his tribute to his father Anthony Mallett, wrote: “I’m going to wrap up my story about my father with what is the single, most significant aspect of the impact of Dad on my life. It is this: He absolutely adored our mother. So much of what I’ve been gifted in my 68 years is rooted in his unwavering love for my fantastic mom. From an early age, it was abundantly clear to us as children: Mom was Number One.”

A few paragraphs later he writes: “Hs deep love for my mother gave me such a sense of stability…”

This looks like a seriously interesting and moving book.

Undone – Healing from botched cosmetic surgery: a memoir, by Michelle Roniak (Melinda Ferguson Books)

The first thing I looked for when I opened this book was pictures. I mean, how badly botched was she? But there are none, except for one postage stamp-sized pic on the back cover, of an attractive blonde.

Which is at odds with her story. From an early age she thought she was ugly. Or as she says in the first line of her preface: “Even before my botched cosmetic surgery, I lived with the deep conviction that I was a factory reject… I believed I was born defective, assembled from inferior parts… I morphed, obsessed, camouflaged, sliced, filled, injected and agonised.”

She had a jaw correction, a boob job, botox and heaven knows what else. And then she made the fateful decision to have extensive liposuction and a labiaplasty.

From the way she describes the results, she must have looked like a monster. Some time after the surgery her remaining fat started to migrate all over her body, to her neck, to her upper arms, to her breasts and to her thighs. The breasts, which reportedly grew several sizes virtually overnight, along with her thighs, were hideously painful.

She was so unhappy, uncomfortable and distraught she wanted to die. She took cocaine, mushrooms, plenty of alcohol.

In 2018, as a single woman aged 39, she even wrote to Dignitas, the Swiss organisation that provides doctor-assisted suicides, telling them she hated herself and strongly felt she could not go on living.

But she said she wanted to go gracefully, and not cause further devastation to her family, adding: “Are there any options for someone in my situation or any resources you could recommend? I know this seems inhumane, but one way or another I am going to do this.”

On the night of her planned suicide – after a farewell party with her friends, who of course didn’t know it was a farewell party – she confessed her plans to a former lover, and within hours she was in a psychiatric clinic.

She discovered she was suffering from a mental condition called body dysmorphic disorder, “a preoccupation with perceived defects or flaws in one’s physical appearance that are barely, if at all, noticeable to the outside world”.

With therapy and support, she became a physical hero, entering Iron Man competitions, swimming to Robben Island and completing the Comrades Marathon in 2025.

She combs news and social media sources for information about people like her, but finds very little. A gynacologist she consults tells her: “The world really needs a story like this. Things are getting out of control regarding the unrealistic standards against which people are measuring themselves.”

She writes that after her botched surgery she developed avoidance behaviours and emotional numbness that disconnected her from everyday life. “Unlike the victims of other traumatic experiences who receive sympathy, those suffering from botched procedures often face judgement: ‘You did this to yourself’.”

There are days, she writes, when she feels the pull of old, destructive thought patterns. But now she has tools to deal with them –  meditation, communal support, writing and journalling and – above all – “sport that celebrates what my body can do rather than how it looks”.

Red Tape – The untold story of a visionary South African’s battle against bureaucracy, and the birth of a world-renowned wine region, by Bridgid Hamilton Russell (Quickfox)

If it weren’t for the surname of the author, this book’s title and cover would give barely any hint as to what it’s about: Tim Hamilton Russell’s heroic tilt at SA’s closed wine industry of the 1970s, dominated by monopolies, Afrikaner nationalism and apartheid-era control.

Hamilton Russell, who has made Hemel-en-Aarde wines internationally famous, fought a courageous and ultimately successful battle against all sorts or reactionary forces including restrictive laws, industry boycotts and various court battles to prove Suth Africa could produce world class wines.

In her author’s note Bridget Hamilton Russell, the late winemaker’s daughter, writes: “This memoir is an account of one man’s quest to break down barriers and cut through the red tape imposed on him by the regime of the day. It recounts his ambition to make the best wine in South Africa by farming particular noble grape varieties and adopting the proven winemaking techniques that had been used by the French for centuries. Once he had found a farm in a location that had never previously been considered as suitable for winemaking, he discovered that to pursue his ambition, be would be breaking a number of the country’s laws.”

The Hemel-en-Aarde Valley – outside Hermanus – is now home to more than 20 wine producers, all making Burgundy-style wines that benefit from proximity to cool Atlantic breezes.

What We Can Know, by Ian McEwan (Jonathan Cape)

From the author of Atonement and On Chesil Beach, this novel explores how climate change can utterly upend life as we know it.

It’s set in 2119, when Tom Metcalfe, a scholar at the University of the South Downs in the UK, part of Britain’s remaining archipelagos, pores over the archives of the early 21^st century, ie today, “captivated by the freedoms and possibilities of human life at its zenith”.

Vivien Blundy is the wife of Francis, a celebrated elderly poet. She had been an Oxford don, with potential to be made a professor, but after the death of her first husband and her marriage to Francis, she has become his secretary and housekeeper in a barn in rural Gloucestershire.

At her 54^th birthday he presents her with a poem he has written to her, A Corona for Vivien, but there appears only ever to have been one copy.

Now Metcalfe is searching for this poem, only once read aloud at Vivien’s birthday and never heard again.

It seems to have been a swansong for an English way of life before everything changed – before climate catastrophe and war – a symbol of all that has been lost.

The cover blurb tells us this is at once “a quest, a literary thriller and a love story… a masterpiece that reclaims the present from our sense of looming catastrophe and imagines a future world where all is not quite lost”.

This is definitely my next read.

• This is one of Exclusive Books top reads for the summer holidays.

Remain – A supernatural love story, by Nicholas Sparks with M Night Shyamalan (Sphere)

Books about the supernatural are not my thing, even when they’re love stories, but this one does sound intriguing. Tate is a New York architect who heads off to Cape Cod to design a summer home for a friend.

Tate has had a rough time lately – his beloved sister died, and he has been in a psychiatric clinic being treated for acute depression. He’s also uncomfortable about his sister’s deathbed announcement that she can see spirits who are still attached to the living world, because he doesn’t reallygoin for that sort of thing.

At his Cape Cod bnb he meets Wren, a young woman with whom he forges an immediate connection. But not all in this charming little town is as delightful as it seems, and their blossoming relationship is threatened by various undercurrents. He decides he needs to unearth the truth about Wren’s past while there is still time.

This novel is a collaboration between the author of love stories like The Notebook, and the writer and director of blockbuster thriller films like The Sixth Sense.

Despite the frivolity of the holidays coming up, some seriously serious books landed on my desk in November. Fortunately two are written with a light touch. The others worthy but look extremely interesting. Some of these books will be reviewed in full later. We’ll start with the two lighter reads. – Vivien Horler

Loony Birds, Lion Men, and the Snake that was a Gerbil – 20 of the Best Bush Tales from Southern Africa by David Bristow (Jacana)

Writer, editor and adventurer David Bristow collects stories. He actually produced the four-volume Stories from the Veld. Anything that comes in four volumes is a bit daunting, but in this book he has selected 20 of the best tales.

Describing a hunt for a lion wounded by an amateur hunter somewhere near Maun, Bristow writes of lion claws: “These weapons of mass destruction are usually around four centimetres long, hard as carbon steel and sharp as razors. They can do a large amount of harm to a soft-skinned body.

“Then come the fangs…”

His first chapter about lions and lion men segues into the story of Harry Wolhuter, Southern Africa’s first game ranger. If you’ve been to Skukuza rest camp’s library-museum in the Kruger Park, you will have seen the skin of the lion that attacked him, and the knife he used to kill it while he was being dragged off for supper.

It is an extraordinary story of derring-do.

But the book is not all about lions.

There’s a chapter on the Cradle of Humankind, a camping trip that Bristow went on as a young man that went awry, a chapter on the sad story of Krotoa who became Mevrou Eva van Meerhoff, another on the extraordinary history of Mapungubwe, and many besides. This is a treasure of a book.

Raising the Bar – The making of a judge, by Jeremy Pickering (Staging Post)

Jeremy Pickering figures he’s the only SA judge ever to have worked as a clown. He may also have been the only clown ever to have become a judge.

The temporary career took place while he was on a gap year in the UK, where to start with he had to bed down in the elephant trailer. He says they were pretty rustig.

He grew up on a dairy farm in the Eastern Cape, studied law at Stellenbosch University, took his gap year – he also worked on a farm as an assistant pig man – before returning to SA where he became a prosecutor in Grahamstown (now Makhandla), an advocate in Mthatha, and director of the Legal Resources Centre in the Eastern Cape before becoming a judge of the Eastern Cape Division of the High Court. He retired in 2019.

He is obviously a clever, serious and erudite man, but he is also extremely funny and his book is a delight.

Or as retired Constitutional Court Judge Edwin Cameron writes: “It is a delightful memoir – entertaining, richly populated and wittily written. I have read it with amusement and enjoyment.”

As for me, I was laughing out loud.

Unbroken Chains – A 5 000-year history of African Enslavement, by Martin Plaut (Hurst & Company, London)

Now things get a touch more serious.

Martin Plaut would seem to know what he’s talking about. He was the BBC World Service’s Africa Editor, and has published extensively on African affairs. He has been an adviser to the UK Foreign Office and the US State Department, and is a senior researcher at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies.

But he started off by growing up in Cape Town, and studying law at UCT. After 1976 he left for exile in Britain, and London has been his home since.

Plaut wrote the biography of Dr Abdullah Abdurahman, the first black South African to win an election in the country, becoming a Cape Town city councillor from 1904 until his death in 1940.

Plaut wrtes: “Dr Abdurahman was the grandson of a slave, probably brought from Bengal. It troubled me that I knew so little about the slave trade across the Indian Ocean, which has been swamped by the Trans-Atlantic narrative, and so I decided to look at the subject in more detail.”

He writes of the slaves of the vast Sokoto Caliphate; the fate of the Oromo slaves from Ethiopia, captured and forced to march for weeks and months until they were sold in Arabia; and the men and woman of Irish villages captured and taken to North Africa as slaves.

“Each is a fragment of the African story of enslavement that has not yet concluded. Slavery continues to this day, with refugees trapped in Libya’s officially sanctioned detention centres still being sold to the highest bidder.”

This will be a tough read, but it looks seriously interesting.

Bosadi, by Kopano Matlwa (Jacana)

This is November’s only novel, and it opens dramatically: “I killed him. I sliced his neck open early on Christmas morning, while he slept with that pathetic look on his face.”

Matlakala was given the knife by one Rakgadi, who advises Matlakala to take it everywhere she goes. “It cuts like a hot knife to butter.”

And this proves to be the case. Matlakala says: “I was surprised at how easily the tissues split, did not resist being separated.”

Then there is Aunty, a Zimbabwean domestic worker, who watches as her employer’s marriage crumbles.

The two women, both lost and sad, develop a sort of sisterhood.

The cover tells us this story in told in alternating voices, and says: “Bosadi is a devastating exploration of gender, grief, immigration, violence and the impossible expectations that swallow women whole.”

It is written by the author who won the 2006/2007 European Award for her first novel Coconut.It was followed by Spilt Milk and then Period Pain, which was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Fiction Prize.

Matlwa is a public health physician living in Johannesburg.

A Moon will Rise from the Darkness – Reports on Israel’s genocide in Palestine, by Francesca Albanese; ed by Mandy Turner and Lex Takkenberg (Pluto Press)

Francesca Albanese is the UN special rapporteur on human rights in Palestine and has been documenting Israel’s actions in Palestine and Gaza. She recently – and controversially – visited South Africa.

In her introduction, she writes her first challenging encounter with the concept of genocide in Palestine came in 2023 – I gather before the Hamas attacks – when an Israeli holocaust survivor asked her why she was not investigating the genocide of the Palestinian people. She says she instinctively resisted the term, thinking instead of Nazi-occupied Europe, Rwanda and Bosnia. But she came to understand genocide is not committed by method, but by intent.

“This realisation, immense and unsettling, revealed the false premise that a state born from genocide could not commit genocide itself. History demonstrates the opposite: unhealed trauma can inflict further wounds.”

Apart from a foreword by former special rapporteurs on Palestine: Richard Falk, John Dugard and Michael Lynk, there are three chapters: Anatomy of a Genocide; Genocide as Colonial Erasure; and  From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide.

This will clearly not be a summer holiday read, but I suspect it is a profoundly important book.

All sale proceeds will go to UNRWA, the UN agency that supports Palestinian refugees.

These are among the books that landed on my desk in October. The Killing Stones by Ann Cleeves is among Exclusive Books’s top reads for October. Some of these books will be reviewed in full later. – Vivien Horler

Hope Arising – The story of SA’s Joule electric vehicle, and why it still matters, by Gerhard Swart (Quickfox)

Some years ago a neighbour had a sticker on the rear window of his bakkie reading: “I’d rather be driving a Joule.”

What’s a Joule, I wanted to know. It was an SA-developed electric car, he told me. He worked for the company.

It showed fantastic potential and promise, and yet in 2012 the project was halted.

Author and engineer Gerhard Swart was a co-founder of the project and lead engineer. In his career he contributed to the development of the Rooivalk attack helicopter and was the systems engineer behind the Southern African Large Telescope SALT.

In this book he describes the struggles, the innovations, the triumphs and the setbacks that led to the development and then the abandonment of the Joule project.

Of the book, Professor Wikus van Niekerk, dean of engineering at Stellenbosch University, says: “It’s a compelling and honest read that reveals the highs and lows of one of SA’s most daring engineering ventures. More than that, it’s a powerful reminder of what SA-trained engineers are capable of when given the chance.”

Fifteen Colonial Thefts – A guide to looted African heritage in museums, edited by Sela K Adjei and Yann LeGall (Pluto Press)

The Elgin Marbles, the Benin Bronzes – and thousands more artefacts were looted, stolen and sold to colonial powers. In many cases they are still displayed in the museums of Europe and the United States.

This volume is a collection of essays on 15 items that explore the history of colonial violence in Africa, all looted at the height of the imperial era and brought to first world museums. In most cases – although not all: the return of the remains of Saartjie Baartman from France being an example – there is stern resistance to their repatriation.

And yet usually the items have deep spiritual and cultural significance in their native lands.

One of the essays is a powerful piece by Nii Kwate Owoo from Ghana’s Gold Coast who went to London in the 1960s to study film.. A visit to the Africa section of the British Museum gave him an idea of the subject of his graduation film.

The Africa section was housed in “a huge room, filled with glass vitrines from the ground to the ceiling. I was amazed, because for the first time in my life I realised the amount of material that had been taken away, including exceptional pieces of Asante regalia… I had never seen these things before; some of them were very sacred cultural assets, works of art created by our ancestors that had only been meant for religious veneration in sacred shrines, not for public exhibition.”

He made his film, You Hide Me, in 1970, which resurfaced in 2020 after his son, living in the US shortly after the murder of George Floyd, persuaded his dad to let it be shown at the BlackStar Film Festival in Philadelphia. Later it won best short documentary at the 2020 Paris Short Film Festival.

The screening of the film has sparked interest in Ghana in the potential return of Asante artefacts to the country. Nii Owoo now wants his film “decolonised from the English language” so that it can be shown in Ghanaian languages to spark debates on the issue, and then in versions “in Swahili, Yoruba, Igbo, isiZulu, IsiXhosa… This is my vision for the future”.

The Killing Stones – The return of Jimmy Perez, by Anne Cleeves (Macmillan)

Yay, a new Jimmy Perez novel!

If you haven’t read Jimmy Perez detective fiction before, you’re in for a treat. Or you might know that if you’ve seen the TV series Shetland.

Cleeves is prolific, what with her Shetland series, her Vera series and her newer Two Rivers series, set in Devon. The Vera and Shetland series are my favourites.

Not sure if I’ve missed something, but Jimmy Perez is now living with Willow, their four-year-old son and another baby on the way, in the Orkneys – an island archipelago a bit closer to the Scottish mainland than the Shetlands.

It’s December and the weather is wild. Archie Stout is out in it, shouting, knowing his words can’t be heard above the wind. He’s wet and windblown, and looking forward to joining his mates in the Pierowall Hotel bar – he’s already an hour late.

Archie is worried about a problem, and resolves to discuss it with Perez. And then a familiar figure emerges out of the gloom, swathed in a waterproof. “Ah,” Archie says. “So it’s you.”

Hours later Archie’s body is found, bludgeoned to death with a Neolithic stone bearing ancient inscriptions. The local community is shocked.

But fear not: Jimmy Perez is on the case.

Letters from Elena, by Anne Hamilton (Legend Press)

As children in an English village, April and Elena are inseparable. One day, they vow, when they are grown up, they will travel together to Cyprus, the island where Elena’s family is from.

But long before that, in 1974, Elena and her family disappear. apparently back to the now war-torn island. April is devastated.

Elena was good at writing, but never writes her friend a letter.

Except that it turns out she did write – letters to April and her former classmates and posted to their teacher.

For reasons which I haven’t discovered yet, the teacher passes them on only years later at a tough time in April’s life, when both her parents have just died and she and her long-term boyfriend have split up.

And suddenly April decides now is the time to visit Cyprus, and perhaps find out what happened to Elena.

She falls in with a group of hospitable Greeks, and also meets Red, an Irishman with whom she feels an instant connection – but there are complications there.

And that’s as far as I’ve got, but I certainly plan to go on reading.

Healing the Mother Wound – A guide that will change your life, by Moshitadi Lehlomela (Tafelberg)

Moshitadi Lehlomela wrote a book called The Girl who Survived her Mother, which I have not read, but I understand describes a toxic childhood.

In her introduction to this, a self-help book, she says she was conceived when her older brother was a little older than a year.

“Pregnant again while still caring for an infant, her husband became more and more distant, her mother-in-law abusive, and poverty tightened its grip as she mourned the slow but imminent death of her dreams.”

Even as a foetus, Lehlomela says she could sense the chaos on the outside.

“So by the time I was earthside, I had already sucked my thumb thin and dry.” She continued this habit into adulthood.

(I too sucked my thumb, until I was 11, but the only blame I placed on my parents for this was that they never offered me – deeply unfashionable at the time – a dummy).

Her mother was wrathful, mercurial, depressed, physically and verbally abusive. “…and so by the age of six I began to self-protect by turning away from my mother, having few expectations of her and actively dissociating from my environment”.

Healing the Mother Wound is part sequel to her first book, part workbook. She has tables with tick boxes: “Were you abused in any of the ways below: Constant yelling? Constant rage: Hatred? Humiliation? Emotional incest? Scapegoating? Favouritism” and so on.

I don’t think I, thank God, need this book, but there are many who may.