These are among the books that have crossed my desk this month. The first three, The Paris Express, Butter and I Am a Girl from Africa are among Exclusive Books’ top reads for June. Some will be reviewed in full later. –  Vivien Horler

The Paris Express, by Emma Donoghue (Picador)

In 1895 the Paris Express from Granville on the Normandy coast burst through the front wall of Montparnasse station in Paris, killing a newspaper seller on the pavement below – but, remarkably, no one else.

As the acclaimed author Emma Donoghue (Room, The Wonder) writes in an author’s note, the derailment was, technically, a minor one.

And yet she has written “an edge of your seat historical thriller” that cannot be put down. I haven’t read it yet, but I have started.

It begins with a description of some of the people on board the train that October day, starting with young Mado Pelletier, who has taken an overnight trip to Granville to see the sea, and to buy “what she needed”.

Then there is seven-year-old Maurice Marland, making his first major rail trip all by himself, (who in real life went on to become a Resistance hero in World War II).

There are the “rollers” – the two men on the footplate, and the guards, one of whom appears to have saved the day, and many other passengers, real and imagined.

The Paris Express looks most interesting, and since it’s written by an acclaimed storyteller, is probably very good indeed.

Butter, by Asako Yuzuki, translated by Polly Barton (4^th Estate)

Rika Machida is a socially aware, anti-misogyny journalist who is desperate to have an interview with gourmet cook Manako Kakjii. But Kakjii is in prison, awaiting a retrial for the murder of three businessmen she is said to have seduced and defrauded.

Kakjii ignores all Rika’s written entreaties, until a friend suggests a different way of getting through to the prisoner – by asking her for a recipe.

This prompts an immediate response: “Feel free to come and see me whenever suits you. Regards.”

Rika drops everything to get to the prison. She is not much of a cook herself, but realises she is going to have show some interest in food if she is to get Kakjii to open up to her.

When Kakjii asks her what’s in her fridge, and she mentions margarine, Kakjii is appalled. Even if you can’t cook, she says, you could make hot rice with cold butter and soy sauce.

“There are only two things I can’t tolerate,” says Kakjii. “Feminists and margarine.”

Back home Rika tries the rice/butter/soy recipe and is enchanted. A BBC reviewer of this novel wrote she made this recipe herself “and it’s incredible”.

And that’s the beginning of this intriguing novel that has been an international bestseller.

I Am a Girl from Africa – A memoir of empowerment, community and hope, by Elizabeth Nyamayaro (Scribner)

This memoir opens with a little girl lying in the dirt under a leafless, drought-ravaged tree, telling herself to get up. But she can’t. She is close to death from starvation.

And then she senses a shadow, and looks up to see a much older sisi standing over her. This sisi kneels down and produces a bowl of porridge, which the little girl gobbles up. She tells the child she is from Unicef, and is there to help feed hungry children.

Elizabeth Nyamayaro writes: “What I don’t know yet is that this particular encounter will define the purpose of my life, acting as a beacon that motivates my actions and aspirations; the light that guides me through every darkness.”

And it’s an extraordinarily inspiring tale, because little Elizabeth, who spent her first 10 years in a remote rural village in Zimbabwe, and went to school for the first time when she was 10, has gone on to become a political scientist and former senior advisor to the Under-Secretary -General and executive director for UN Women.

She has also had leadership roles at the World Bank, the WHO and UNAIDS.

She now lives in New York.

Behind Prison Walls – Unlocking a safer South Africa, by Edwin Cameron, Rebecca Gore and Sohela Surajpal (Tafelberg)

My heart sank a bit when this volume landed on my desk. As retired Constituional Court judge Edwin Cameron says in a foreword, despite SA having 243 prisons, we prefer not to think about them. “Like abattoirs, they are designed not to be open or transparent.”

I live close to Pollsmoor Prison and pass it most days. Sometimes friends and I go for a meal at Steenberg Village, which shares a boundary with Pollsmoor, and the plight of those inside does cross my mind when I’m off to a nice evening of dinner and wine.

Cameron writes that for the most part, “our prisons are miserable and failing in their task of rehabilitating inmates… Overcrowding is ever present, a dangerous bane for personnel and prisoners alike”.

Not the first book you reach for. And yet I’ve found the first two chapters thoroughly readable – who knew Judge Cameron’s father had spent time in prison for car theft?

So maybe worth reading after all.

Corporate Newsman – A life of integrity, by Kaizer Nyatsumba

Kaizer Nyatsumba and I worked at different newspapers owned by the same company, he at The Star in Johannesburg and me at the Cape Argus in Cape Town.

But his career path was stellar – what happened to me, as my mum might have said.

In a foreword to this autobiography, The Star’s former editor-in-chief, Peter Sullivan, said of Kaizer: “He is like one of those Russian dolls, the matryoshka, each time you uncover one there is another inside.”

Sullivan then goes on to list Kaizer’s many manifestations: “Academic, sportsman, activist, author, poet, journalist, father, businessman, political analyst, TV personality, role model, fearful of his God, respecting his ancestors. That’s 12… of course there is Kaizer the lover, and husband…”

His early years were typical of the lives of many poor, rural African children – his first home was on a farm near White River and school was kilometres away – but his life trajectory has been anything but typical.

He won a bursary to Georgetown University in Washington, later joined The Star, eventually rising to become the first African editor of a mainstream newspaper in SA, the Independent on Saturday.

And from there it was into the boardrooms of Anglo American, Coca-Cola, Sasol – not a happy time – and PetroSA.

There have been – as there are in all lives – ups and downs, but Kaizer’s trajectory is probably summed up by the title of his epilogue chapter: “A life well lived”.

The Man Who Changed a Landscape – The Adrian Gardiner Story, by Dean Allen (Dean Allen)

Here’s another tale about a remarkable South African – Adrian  Gardiner, the man who created Shamwari Game Reserve in the Eastern Cape and introduced upmarket eco-tourism to the country.

This book is a vanity project, but a quick scan reveals it to be well-written and interesting, authored by the man who wrote Empire, War and Cricket.

Born in Bulawayo, Gardiner was educated at UCT (a party animal, he took seven years to get his undergraduate degree) and his first job was at Spar’s head office in Cape Town, followed by a stint at Golden Arrow. His first foray into the Eastern Cape was thanks to going back to Spar there.

A varied and mostly successful career followed. In 1989, living in what was then Port Elizabeth, with his sons at school in Grahamstown, he decided it would be fun to buy a small farm in the Eastern Cape as a weekend retreat.

The farm, not far from what is now Makhanda, had been farmed and over-grazed for generations. Yet as Allen points out: “Within three short years he would not only develop this part of the Eastern Cape into an exclusive wildlife destination. He would also bring back the elephants and other species that belonged there.”

This book tells the story of how he did it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

These are among the books that landed on my desk this month. The first three – One Call Away, The Secret History of Sharks, and Addict – along with Harlan Coben’s Nobody’s Fool, which was reviewed in full on Sunday April 20, are all on Exclusive Books’s list of top reads for April.
Some of the books below will be reviewed in full later. – Vivien Horler

One Call Away: The (intimate) story of the doctor who stood between death and survival, by Anne Biccard (Jacana)
This is Johannesburg doctor Dr Anne Biccard’s third memoir of working in A&E at a Gauteng public hospital, written with concern, humour and warmth.
She admits doctors aren’t always right. One of the first cases she mentions is that of a small child who fell off the bed and may have a broken arm. The child is cradling his left arm, but when Biccard studies the X-rays, she can’t see a problem.
Clearly though something is wrong, so she rings a radiologist – at home at dawn on a Sunday – to ask her to have a look. She confirms the arm is fine, adding: “But it is just the broken clavicle…”
Biccard had scrutinised the arm in great detail, but her eye never went as high as the collar bone, which is clearly snapped in half.
“Ohhh,” she says weakly, to chortles on the other end of the line.
Biccard describes what practising medicine is like in all its gory glory, and doesn’t spare the reader much.

If you’re a young person dreaming of being a doctor, a book like this might set your ambitions in stone, or drive you, screaming, away from the medical profession.
But I thoroughly enjoyed her first two books, and expect to enjoy this one too.

The Secret History of Sharks – The rise of the ocean’s most fearsome predators, by John Long (Quercus)
John Long, now Strategic Professor of Palaeontology at Flinders University in Australia, has been collecting shark fossils, mainly teeth, since the age of seven.
He has, he says, a deep respect for the role sharks have played in regulating their ecosystems, and how they have adapted over hundreds of millions of years to Earth’s constant engine of change.
He describes sharks as “the poster children for evolutionary success, the prism through which we can see the struggles of all life – maybe even our own”.
They have some extraordinary gifts: their sense of smell is capable of detecting minute amounts of blood or other organic compounds in the water from hundreds of metres away.
They are also able to detect the faint electrical fields of other living creatures, which Long points out is handy when your prey might be buried under sand.
“It has been claimed that sharks can detect electric currents as weak of one billionth of a volt, and that if two AA batteries were connected under the sea, a shark could sense the charge from a thousand miles away.”
How did sharks survive so many extinction events that wiped out other creatures, such as the dinosaurs?
The answers are here, in more than 400 pages. That might be a bit much for the average reader, but the American scientist, author and historian Jared Diamond says of this book: “Will keep you on the edge of your sea from its first page to its last.”

Addict – A tale of drugs and recovery, by Milton Schorr (Penguin)
Milton Schorr was a happy little Cape Town boy, singing around the house. He had a mum, a dad and two sisters. He didn’t see his dad much, as he was always working, but his mum loved him.
When he was seven his dad left, and the family had to move to a much smaller home. Mum had to work now, and just wasn’t that loving, always-there presence any more.
In his early teens, Milton became enraged, furious, angry. Shoplifting, porn, cigarettes of course, booze, weed. It all helped him to be the person he felt he really was – broken, a wreck, unlovable.
When he was 15 he watched the Leonardo DiCaprio movie Basketball Diaries. He writes: “Where others saw a tragedy on the screen, I saw something more. In Leo’s haunted face as he wandered the streets of New York a drug-soaked wreck, I saw absolution. I saw peace.
“Because release comes when the inside matches the outside, even if just for a moment.”
So at 17, when he was offered heroin, he stuck out his arm. A friend said: “You sure?” Milton nodded. “The answer was always yes.”
Clean for 19 years when he sat down to write this book, he asked himself: “Why did I choose to see the dark, when my friends did not?”
This book is the answer.

Juliet Prowse: Born to Dance – The extraordinary life story of my aunt, by Juliet E Prowse
When I received an email from Juliet Prowse, I was a bit surprised. I’d certainly heard of her, but was she still alive?
Well, no, she died in 1996, just days before her 60th birthday, it turns out. My emailer was Juliet E Prowse, the famous dancer’s niece, who had written a biography of her. Would I give it some publicity?
When I was growing up, Juliet Prowse – the aunt – was famous in her home country of South Africa as a dancer, singer and actor. She was also famous for her legs that went on forever. There’s a picture of Prowse on the back cover of this volume doing the splits while upright and dancing in high heels.
Photographs would appear in the newspapers of her with Frank Sinatra, who asked her to marry him, and Elvis Presley, with whom she starred in the film GI Blues. She had a 40-year career, mainly in the US, and was hugely famous.
Not bad for a girl who spent part of her childhood in Kimberley and who grew up in South Africa.

The Lions’ Den, by Iris Mwanza (Canongate)
Newly qualified lawyer Grace Zulu has her first case: to defend Willbess Mulenga against charges of committing acts “against nature” – being in drag at a pub, and later being caught having sex with an unknown male patron. This might be 1990s Zambia, but Zulu is pretty sure homosexuality isn’t “against nature”.
It’s a pro bono case, which no one else wanted, but Zulu is excited about the challenge.
When she goes to the central police station to meet her client, the policeman at the door asks her for an “expediting fee”. However, when it emerges they come from neighbouring villages, he drops this demand, saying that next time she must just bring a “token of appreciation”.
But when Mulenga is brought into the interview room, Zulu is shocked. His face is bruised, his right eye swollen shut, and one of his teeth is chipped.
The policeman tells her Mulenga was injured when he resisted arrest, but Zulu points out the injuries are fresh, while Mulenga was arrested five weeks earlier.
Her argument angers the policeman, who tells her the interview is over. Enraged, Zulu threatens to file a complaint for police brutality, and for soliciting a bribe.
The policeman shoves Zulu with such force that she falls, hitting her head on the floor and passing out.
And that’s the beginning of what looks like a fascinating debut novel.
Dr Iris Mwanza is a Zambian-American writer, a lawyer and deputy director of women and leadership in the Gender Equality Division of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

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

Only Good Things – Celebrating 100 feel-good SA stories of 2024, by Brent Lindeque, Tyler Leigh Vivier, Ashleigh Nefdt and Nothando Mthembu (Good Things Guy)

The word boep – specifically the term beer boep – has been added to the Oxford Dictionary.

It means, as we all know: “A protuberant belly or paunch [especially] on a man, attributed to beer consumption.”

This is just one of the stories to smile about in the Good Things Guy Brent Lindeque’s second coffee table volume of stories to brighten our days. And since things, both international and national, are somewhat dire, we all need a touch of cheer.

In his introductory letter to this title, Lindeque says the Good Things Guy has blossomed from a simple idea to share the brighter side of SA to become “something much bigger than I could ever have imagined. It has become a movement, one that has firmly cemented itself as SA’s leading platform for good news.”

Lindeque says his good news stories are a source of inspiration, not just for individuals but also for mainstream news outlets. “It’s been amazing to watch them pick up our stories, further spreading the ripple effect of hope.”

So here you can read about a foreign stem cell donor who helped save the life of a local leukaemia sufferer; a Cape Town man who moved into a flat after a lifetime in a shack; a poisoned dog who was rescued; a penguin with scoliosis having his life saved by a device that enabled him to swim; clean-up initiatives; a memorial to Pigcasso, the painting pig; the love story of a couple who shared a desk in grade 4, years later reached out to each other on Twitter, and then got engaged back in their grade 4 classroom; how to work wonders with your budget; turning beach plastics into artworks – the list goes on.

My only criticism: there should be 365 stories in this book, so we can start each day with a positive energy boost. May the Good Things Guy team go from strength to strength.

Brooke Shields is Not Allowed to Get Old – Thoughts on ageing as a woman, by Brooke Shields (Piatkus)

Well, for one thing Brooke Shields is not old – she’s 59. Also, she’s still gorgeous.

But even she is aware the years are ticking by.  She writes that the first time it dawned on her she had reached “a certain age”, she was walking in downtown New York with her two “stunning” daughters.

She’s used to being recognised in the street, but this time the glances were being cast at her daughters, not her.

She writes: “I had every single feeling, all at once. What are you doing ogling my babies I will cut you but also aren’t they gorgeous but also, wait, no one’s gazing at me? When did that happen? Am I over?

“Protectiveness, pride, melancholy – it all smacked me upside the head in one quintessential New York moment.”

I remember going to a restaurant with my mother and younger sister, and the waitress spoke exclusively to my sister and me – until my mother pointed out, quite forcefully, that she was paying for the lunch and would appreciate it if the waitress spoke to her too.

Which leads on to Shields’s next point: that brands trip over themselves to capture the coveted 18-to 34 demographic, even though surveys show it’s women over 40 who have the most purchasing power. “We have accumulated wealth, and we’re making 85% of the household-buying decisions… We are ignored by brands, and when we are targeted, it’s for wrinkle cream or menopause supplements. Talk about short-sighted.”

She quotes the American Psychological Assocation’s Monitor on Psychology describing ageism in the US as “one of the last socially acceptable prejudices”.

This book is more than a memoir, it’s a reflection of where she’s been and where she hopes she’s going. She writes about “having work done”, although very little on herself other than colouring her roots and having treatment to even her skin tone.

She is happy accepting her limits, and says acceptance is not defeat but is understanding that you can’t or don’t want to do something, and then just not doing it.

I think this book looks interesting.

The Lost Love of Akbar Manzil, by Shubnum Khan (Macmillan)

Dreams can true, sometimes it just takes a little time.

So writes Shubnum Khan in a note to readers at the start of this novel.

Akbar Manzil is a house, once a grand one, near Durban. But nearly a century after it was built, it is crumbling and dreary when, in 2014, Sana Malek, neither girl or woman, and her father move in, the latest in a long line of tenants.

Sana discovers the house’s deserted west wing, where former tenants’ stuff has been left behind. And at the end of the passage is a locked door, probably unopened for years.

Slowly Sana begins to discover the truth about the house, and its secrets, including the djinn, who sits weeping in a cupboard.

The novel is described as a haunting, a mystery and a love story.

It was first published in 2024, but has been reissued in 2025, with the author’s note and a set of frequently asked questions added to the original text.

Khan, whose debut novel was Onion Tears, said this one took her 13 years to write. It was rejected by publishers numerous times, and endlessly reworked.

Eventually the manuscript sold on auction to one of the biggest publishing houses in New York, and was later selected as a New York Times Editor’s Choice.

All of this, she says, seemed impossible for an SA author making her US debut, “let alone one still living in Durban”.

The Favourites, by Layne Fargo (Chatto & Windus)

Katerina has known since toddlerhood she wanted to win an Olympic gold medal in ice dance. But when, as a pre-teen, she meets Heath, who has grown up in the foster system in Chicago, there is an instant connection.

She teaches him to skate, and he becomes her partner in all ways. But Kat’s homelife hasn’t been that much better than Heath’s, and they see their connection as a way of escaping their troubled pasts.

They achieve their dream to become champion ice dancers, and eventually qualify for the Olympics, where a terrible incident destroys everything.

Ten years after what Kat calls the most terrible day of her life, an unauthorised documentary about Kat and Heath and their relationship is broadcast, reiterating the sensational rumours about the pair.

Kat decides the time has come to the story in her own words – and it’s a pretty wild story.

Precipice, by Robert Harris (Hutchinson Heinemann)

If you’ve seen the movie Conclave you’ll be familiar with the work of Robert Harris, who not only wrote the novel on which it was based but also co-wrote the screenplay.

After his first novel, Fatherland, became a bestseller, he was able to stop being a journalist – he was editor of the Observer at 30 – and turn to fulltime fiction.

He has specialised in historical fiction and Precipice is his latest. It is a story about the (true) relationship between the British Prime Minister, HH Asquith, and a woman less than half his age, on the eve of the outbreak of World War 1.

The powers that be realise top secret documents are being leaked, and an intelligence officer is assigned to discover the source.

It emerges Asquith likes to discuss affairs of state with the gorgeous 26-year-old Hon Venetia Stanley. And we also know, right from the off, she has a wide variety of friends of various nationalities.

In a note, Harris says all the letters quoted in the text from Asquith are authentic, as are the telegrams, newspaper reports and official documents.

Looking forward to this one.

 

 

 

 

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.

 

 

 

 

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 (2^nd 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 19^th 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.

 

 

 

 

 

These are among the books that landed on my desk this month. The first four – Exit Wounds, There are Rivers in the Sky, How to Say Babylon, and The Dark Wives, are part of a list of Exclusive Books’s top reads for September. Some will be reviewed in full later. – Vivien Horler

Exit Wounds: A story of love, loss and occasional wars, by Peter Godwin (Picador Africa)

I pounced on this memoir, having thoroughly appreciated Peter Godwin’s earlier two: Mukiwa, a coming-of-age tale about growing up white in Rhodesia during the war for independence, and When a Crocodile Eats the Sun, about the collapse of his family as Zimbabwe itself goes into a death spiral.

His father dies in the second memoir, by which time Godwin is living in the US, having married a Yorkshire woman he met while a student in the UK. They have a son, and there is a line that struck me: their little family speaks with three different accents.

There was another bit that nearly reduced me to tears: Godwin and his sister want their mother, now elderly and poor thanks to crippling inflation, to leave Zimbabwe and go back to England, but she is resisting them. She’s lived there for 40 years or so, working as a doctor, and when her children pile on the pressure, she sends them a Rudyard Kipling poem purportedly in the voice of a Roman centurion ordered home to Rome after decades in Britain:

“Legate, I come to you in tears – My cohort ordered home!/ I’ve served in Britain forty years. What should I do in Rome?/ Here is my heart, my soul, my mind – the only life I know./ I cannot leave it all behind. Command me not to go!”

But she eventually did leave, as we discover in the opening pages of Exit Wounds. She stays in London with her daughter Georgina, while Peter often flies to see her from New York.

But he says sadly: “There is a sad symmetry to our relationship. I spent the first decade of my life trying to summon my mother’s attention, and she has spent the last decade of hers trying to summon mine.”

There are Rivers in the Sky, by Elif Shafak (Viking/Penguin Books)

This novel has an extraordinarily broad sweep, from the ancient city of Nineveh to Victorian London, then on to Turkey in 2014 and finally back to London in 2018.

The cover blurb tells us this is the story of a lost poem: The Epic of Gilgamesh, two great rivers and three remarkable lives, all connected by a single drop of water, one that keeps being recycled from raindrop to earth and thence back to sky… it’s the sort of story that gets me using the word thence.

I suspect this novel may be a touch higher grade, but it gets enthusiastic shouts from the likes of the great British classicist Mary Beard (“A brilliant, unforgettable novel”) and the best-selling writers Philippa Gregory (“The story flows like the rivers from ancient Nineveh to present-day London, with characters of the distant past as bright and vivid as those of today”), William Boyd, Arundhati Roy and Ian McEwan.

How to Say Babylon – A Jamaican memoir, by Safiya Sinclair (4^th Estate)

Safiya Sinclair grew up in Jamaica, desperate to be a writer and live her own life, but she and her family were dominated by her father, a member of a militant Rasta sect who rejected Babylon, his term for the corrupting influence of the West.

She made it – she has written three prize-winning books and is currently an associate professor of creative writing at Arizona State University.

How she escaped her repressive background is the subject of what the Spectator calls “this electrifying memoir”, which was also one of the Guardian’s “best memoirs and biographies of 2023”.

Writer Elif Shafak – see above – said of Babylon: “I absolutely adored this book… Heartbreaking and heartwarming.”

The Dark Wives – A Vera thriller, by Ann Cleeves (Macmillan)

I’m an enormous fan of Ann Cleeves’s various series of detective thrillers: the Shetland novels, the Two Rivers novels and of course the Vera Stanhope novels, as personified in the TV series by the brilliant actress Brenda Blethyn. (“What’s that, pet?”)

In The Dark Wives, an early morning dog walker finds a body (early-morning dog walkers have a lot to answer for) on a common near a care home for troubled teens. He turns out to be Josh, a staff member.

Detective Inspector Vera Stanhope is called in, and finds her only clue is the disappearance of Chloe Spence, 14, one of the home’s residents. Then a second body is found near the Three Dark Wives, standing stones in the Northumbrian countryside, and “superstition and folklore begin to collide with fact”.

Ann Cleeves has dedicated this detective thriller “to teens everywhere, and especially to the Dark Wives – uppity young women with minds of their own struggling to find a place in a difficult world”.

The Super Cadres – ANC misrule in the age of deployment, by Pieter du Toit (Jonathan Ball Publishers)

Quoting ANC chairman Gwede Mantashe, former Chief Justice Raymond Zondo said in his report, into the allegations of state capture, that the strategic deployment of comrades was an important part of the ANC’s strategy to control the levers of state power.

And we know where that has led. In the prologue to what is clearly an important book about the state of our nation, Pieter du Toit writes that as the party’s secretary general during its most destructive decade, its chair since 2017 “and one of the most enthusiastic defenders of its “ruinous cadre deployment policy, [Gwede Mantashe] bears more responsibility than most for [the party’s] fate in the 2024 elections.

“Mantashe represents a refusal to reform. And the downfall of the ANC.”

In his introduction, Du Toit writes that cadre deployment was formalised as far back as 1997 as a mechanism to ensure the party’s complete dominance over power in the state.

The system, introduced during Nelson Mandela’s time at the helm of both party and country, “but formulated and implemented by [Thabo] Mbeki, ensured that the ANC’s culture of patronage politics and rent-seeking would flourish. Mbeki’s intention with cadre deployment was to ensure the supremacy of African nationalism and party control. But what it eventually led to was the severe weakening of the state, institutional corruption and the rise of a predatory class of ANC deployees focused on large-scale resource extraction”.

Du Toit says his book exposes the depravity of cadre deployment. He goes further, he says, and attempts to explain how the ANC’s super cadres, a class of political power brokers and party headmen, consolidated their power and how the ANC squandered almost every opportunity to modernise SA after 1994, bringing the country to the brink.

Blood Brothers – to Operation Smokeshell and back, by Leon Lamprecht (Jonathan Ball Publishers)

As a female, I was never conscripted into the SA Defence Force, and when I was of an age to have boyfriends and a brother in the military – all in the navy for one thing, so based at Saldanha, Gordon’s Bay and Simon’s Town – it seemed a more innocent age.

As a result I’ve never been particularly interested in the slew of books that have been written about the ghastly experiences of the troepies (and fighters on the other side) in the then South West Africa and Angola.

Journalist Deon Lamprecht was with 61 Mech in Angola, and has now written three books about the war. This one is about a battle he was not part of, which wreaked terrible damage on both sides.

But he says this book is not about glorifying a long-ago war – the battle of Smokeshell took place on a single day in June 1980 – “it is about camaraderie, mutual respect and social support in the here and now”.

It also talks about the horror that can still surface among the men who fought there, and the physical pain and disability some of them suffer to this day.

These are among the respectable haul of books that landed on my desk this month. The first three – Irascible Genius by Kevin van Wyk, Hot Tea and Apricots by Kim Ballantine, and The Tea Merchant by Jackie Phamotse, are among Exclusive Books’s top reads for the month. A fourth novel, A Short Life by Nicky Greenwall, also one of Exclusive’s top reads, will be reviewed on The Books Page on Sunday, September 1. Some of these books will be reviewed in full later. – Vivien Horler

Irascible Genius – A son’s memoir, by Kevin van Wyk (Macmillan)

I remember reading the late lamented Chris van Wyk’s brilliant and best-selling Shirley, Goodness and Mercy, and marvelling. Most other memoir writers describe what happened in their lives, while Van Wyk has you there in the Riverlea yard with him and his friends, playing cricket.

In his memoirs of life in Johannesburg’s Riverlea, Van Wyk comes across as charming and genial, and yet judging from the title of this book by his older son, the writer was certainly clever, but a man who could be distinctly short-tempered.

In a preface, Kevin writes that as his father got older, the family would find his descriptions of what had outraged him funny. He would look at their bemused smiles, and say: “Ag, you know I can be full of shit sometimes.”

Chris van Wyk, who also wrote poetry, children’s books and biographies, died of cancer in 2014. In the months leading to his death Kevin was often the person to drive him to his treatments, and the pair shared many philosophical discussions.

Kevin went to Wits to study law, and has since held various positions as a legal adviser in the banking, hospitality and telecommunications sectors.

The publishers say on the cover: “If storytelling runs in the genes, Kevin may just be proof that his father’s spirit lives on.”

Hot Tea and Apricots – A memoir of loss and hope, by Kim Ballantine (Self-published)

When you think how intricate and complicated the human body is, all the processes and bits that have to work right and in concert so that we can get on with our lives, it’s amazing how little, generally, goes wrong.

Except sometimes of course it does, spectacularly. Kim Ballantine, a Johannesburg-based industrial psychologist who made her living from talking, was taken ill on her 40^th birthday.

It starts with a violent coughing fit, followed by the desperate feeling she cannot breathe. This is because, it turns out, her throat has gone into spasm. A trip to A&E follows and she is eventually diagnosed with chronic spasmodic dysphonia, a condition of severe layrngeal spasms.

The best treatment is to have regular Botox injections into her vocal chords, which relaxes them, but which also means she cannot speak.

However, not only does her job depends on her voice, she is also a wife and mother to three young children. How is it possible she will never speak again?

In the face of this tragedy she turns to sign language – her children learn it with her – as well as writing.

This is a story of family, friendship and faith.

The Tea Merchant – part 1 of a two-book series, by Jackie Phamotse (Penguin Random House)

Luna is a young Khoisan nursing graduate, desperate for job. Waiting for a job interview at a Bellville clinic, she meets Amora, who is Xhosa. After nearly 12 hours, Luna finally goes in and does not like the doctor interviewing her.

Later that evening there is a murder in which both nurses are complicit. But they seem to have got the jobs. Three years later something else happens and they leave town at speed, along with transfer papers, to work in a clinic in Clanwilliam.

There, during a fire on their first night, Luna meets Cameron Coal, who is desperately trying to save his family’s rooibos tea farm. But Cameron’s brother, improbably called Sole Coal, has a secret that could shatter their world.

Jackie Phamotse is a writer, businesswoman, social activist and philanthropist, according to a note about “The Author”. Her debut novel, BARE 1: The Blesser’s Game, was awarded the African Icon Literary Award in Lagos, Nigeria, in 2018. She lives in Sandton.

The note adds that Phamotse’s work “revolves around the narrative of women and children in Africa. Her stories are raw, well-researched and highly thought-provoking”.

I don’t think I’m in the target audience for this novel.

Familiaris, by David Wroblewski (Abacus Books/ Jonathan Ball)

This is a saga set “in the middle of nowhere” in northern Wisconsin in 1919, about a young couple who buy a farm and launch a dog breeding project (domestic dogs’ Latin name is canis familiaris).

I have been reading it on and off for several weeks now, and keep breaking off not because I’m not enjoying it, but because it is very long – nearly 1000 pages – and that’s just too much for me to read in a week. So I keep having to find something shorter to review each Sunday.

The young couple, John and Mary Sawtelle, buy the farm with the somewhat unwilling help of Mary’s stepfather – well she blackailed him, and quite right too.

They go off to the farm with a former ice seller and his enormous horse (he stole the horse when its owners were going to sell it and break up their partnership),  John’s taciturn handyman buddy and a guy John persuaded to enlist in the war, and was grievously wounded. He bears a bitter grudge against John because he was rejected by the army and saw no action.

And then there’s the local shopkeeper whose fey daughter can predict the future, which is not necessarily a blessing.

This is a prequel to The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, which I’d never heard of, but which was published in 2008, becoming a New York Times bestseller and being selected by Oprah Winfrey for her book club. It is reportedly a retelling of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and focuses on John and Mary’s grandson.

Life Lessons – How to fail and win, by Alan Knott-Craig (Tafelberg)

This Alan Knott-Craig is the son, not the former CEO of Vodacom. He’s had his ups and downs in business, having founded, funded or run 21 companies including Cellfind, iBurst, Mxit and HeroTel. The blurb on the cover says he shares what he has learnt, “mostly by losing”.

Self-improvement books or books on how to succeed are generally not my thing, but having dipped into this one on behalf of you, dear readers, I am charmed.

His father was a huge force in his life, and he says until the age of 25 he had no freedom of choice. After school Knott-Craig senior told him if he wanted to study, he would pay, otherwise Knott-Craig junior was on his own. If he wanted to go to the University of Port Elizabeth, now Nelson Mandela University, his dad would pay, otherwise not. If he wanted to do accounting, his dad would pay, otherwise not. If he passed, his dad would pay, otherwise not.

So he went to UPE, studied accounting, and achieved 50% (“any grade over 50% is wasted effort”, a sentiment shared by my son when he was doing maths at UCT).

At the end of the book are scores of useful life lessons which mostly make a lot of sense. Make friends with the alpha male; have someone big in your life, preferably someoin with tattoos, who has your back; if you have to eat shit, don’t  nibble; government money is bad for you; excellence trumps loyalty; how do you avoid becoming addicted to a corporate salary?; go in through the front door (“when you find yourself in bed with crooks and politicians, it’s easy to start copying their tactics… don’t give in to their ways. There’s only one honest way to live and do business. Out in the open. Through the front door”.)

Lucas Mangope – A life, by Oupa Segalwe (Tafelberg)

Lucas Mangope, leader of the apartheid homeland of Bophuthatswana, who died in January 2018, was a controversial figure, seen as both a leader of his people and a “tinpot dictator”.

He was both a traditional leader and an elected politician, who despite having attended the same college – St Peter’s Secondary School in Rosettenville, a British missionary school like Lovedale College in Alice (now Dikweni) – along with the likes of Joe Matthews, Andrew Mlangeni, Oliver Tambo and Fikile Bam – chose another path.

He was the eldest of nine children, born to minor royalty in the village of Motswedi in December 1923, the same village in which author Oupa Segalwe grew up.

This biography has attracted media attention, and I heard a radio interview with Segalwe in which he said Mangope was a revered figure – something like Nelson Mandela – in his community.

In a shout on the cover of this biography, Andrew Manson writes: “People either hate him for being a vicious tyrant or venerate him and the good old days of ‘Bop’. Here we have an assessment of Mangope that is well researched, balanced and fair.”

Segalwe spent his early career as a news reporter in community and state media organisations, and this shows in his writing which is crisp, clear and interesting.

The Corporate Revolutionary – Mervyn King’s life in law, business and governance, by David Williams (Tafelberg)

A quick google of Mervyn King’s life is so dizzying that one doesn’t know where to begin. Suffice it to say he is one of SA’s Great and Good, a guru of corporate governance and sustainability, an advocate, a judge, and a businessman who rewrote the way businesses should operate.

He has been chair and director of many organisations including the Kirsh Trading Group, Frame, FNB Merchant Bank, Operation Hunger, SA Chamber of Business, the Automobile Association of SA, the Global Reporting Initiative in Amsterdam, the International Integrated Reporting Council in London and more.

He believes “accountancy can save the planet”, and advocates that companies should report on society and the environment, not just profit.

In 1992 the Institute of Directors in SA asked him to set up a committee to produce a code of governance for directors and managers in the new SA. At first King demurred, feeling he was too busy, but Nelson Mandela worked his charm, and the result was the King Codes of Corporate Governance, which have been updated several times over the past 30 years, “influencing organisations globally”, according to author David Williams in his prologue. King chaired the committee for 27 years.

Williams writes: “The impact of Mervyn King’s governance work was local and then global – changing the way boards think and the way companies operate, establishing the need for engagement with society beyond work and profits, all with the ultimate aim of saving the planet itself.”

 

 

These are among the books that landed on my desk this month. The first three: The Forgotten Names, by Mario Escobar, The Paris Affair by Maureen Marshall, and The Future, by Dion Chang, Bronwyn Williams and Faeeza Khan, are among Exclusive Books’s top reads for July, along with This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud, which was reviewed on The Books Page on Sunday, July 21.

Some of the books mentioned below will be reviewed in full later. – Vivien Horler

The Forgotten Names, a novel by Mario Escobar (Harper Muse)

Remember the story of Moses? Pharoah had ordered the killing of all Hebrew boy babies in Egypt, but one mother could not bear it. She put her little son into a basket and pushed him off into the treacherous waters of the Nile.

It so happened that very day Pharoah’s daughter went down to the river to bathe, and came upon the basket caught in the reeds, with the baby in it. She took him home and brought him up, and changed the course of history.

The mothers in this extraordinary story did something similar. Early in World War II Klaus Barbie, the “butcher of Lyon”, ordered the deportation of all foreign Jews in France. In one internment camp, Venissieux, a group of people – clergy, civilians, the French Resistance and others – realised an ambiguous order from the Vichy government forbade the deportation of children abandoned by their parents.

So the mothers of 108 children gave up their rights to their children, not knowing if they would ever see them again. And of course they did not.

Fifty years later, French law student Valerie Portheret was doing research into Barbie when she came across the story of the children of Venissieux, and resolved to track them down and reunite them with their true identities. It took her 25 years, but she did it.

The Forgotten Names is a novel based on this extraordinary episode. WW II, and specifically the experiences of Jews in Europe, continue to be a rich source.

The Paris Affair, a novel, by Maureen Marshall (Grand Central)

It is 1886, and an impoverished Fin Tighe is an engineer, working on an exciting project: the building of the Eiffel Tower, which is to be a centrepiece of the upcoming Exposition Universelle and an advertisement for Parisian technological skills.

But not everyone in Paris is keen on the tower, fearing it will ruin the city’s skyline (today, of course, if your apartment has a view of the tower its value is at a premium). And even though the design has been accepted by the organising committee, the furore has meant the government is withholding its promised five million francs.

Now everyone working on the project is told to do what they can to raise money. Fin, who is gay and the illegitimate son of a British earl, meets Gilbert Duhais, wealthy and connected, who persuades him to claim to be the earl’s heir as a way of raising money.

Fin’s enthusiasm for the Eiffel project is palpable: “The mathematical precision involved – hundreds of thousands of joints and angles measured to the 10th of a millimetre – not even the Romans would have dared anything close at the height of their arrogance.”

While homosexuality is not illegal in the Paris of the time, it is not approved of, and Fin finds himself vulnerable. And when a friend is murdered in the rooms above a secret gay club, Fin finds himself in an increasingly dangerous situation.

Looks intriguing.

The Future – More than 80 key trends for South Africa, by Dion Chang, Bronwyn Williams & Faeeza Khan (Tafelberg)

If things seem to be speeding up and the world appears to be less comprehensible than before, it’s not that you’re getting old (although that could be a factor too) – things really are becoming stranger, according to the Flux Trends team.

This book is based on the Flux Trends annual State We’re In Trend, an annual summary of where the world is now and where it’s heading. “Not only does it feel as if we’re losing a sense of reality, but that the world is unravelling,” say the authors.

The current decade “started with the pandemic, which sped up the undercurrents of change already underway since the last decade: a contactless economy, a lockdown life audit that fast-tracked the ‘future of work’, simmering geopolitical tensions, the harsh realities of climate change and the reconfiguring of our social contracts”.

So the authors have produced this book to help us navigate uncharted waters. It describes key trends with insights on what to do so that companies and individuals can turn challenges into strategy.

The trends described fall under six broad headings: technology, retail and marketing, the economy, the natural world, diplomacy, and socio-cultural.

You are Here, by David Nicholls (Sceptre/ Jonathan Ball)

From the first two chapters you have an idea of what’s going to happen. Marnie lives in London where she works from home as a copy editor. She is lonely, but also resistant to getting out more.

Michael is a geography teacher, based in York, who has been increasingly solitary ever since his wife left him. He feels happiest on long solitary hikes, and certainly doesn’t want to see friends or meet people.

Both of them are friends with Cleo, Michael’s boss, who tries hard to get them out of their shells, but they are uncooperative. Until one day both agree to join a group hike across England from the Irish Sea to the North Sea, a distance of 190 miles.

Not all of them plan to do the whole hike, and Marnie is a complete novice, but judging from the first couple of chapters she does agree to go further than planned. And then, according to information on the back cover, “Marnie and Michael suddenly find themselves alone on the most epic of walks and on the precipice of a new friendship… But can they survive the journey?”

A charming humour shines out from the first few pages I’ve read. David Nicholls’s novel Us was long-listed for then Booker, and one critic says: “No one does the minutiae of love as well as Nicholls.”

GQ writes: “Witty and moving at the same time, it’s a figurative and literal journey that might even have you hunting for your walking boots.”

This looks fun.

And now for a slew of SA historical non-fiction.

Rhodes and his Banker – Empire, wealth, and the coming of Union, by Richard Steyn (Jonathan Ball Publishers)

The first Johannesburg branch of the Standard Bank opened in October 1886, just after the diggings had been proclaimed. The bank has been central to SA’s story, and one of its earliest bosses was Lewis Michell, a Cornishman, who arrived at the Cape in the early 1860s.

In Richard Steyn’s preface he tells us Michell had helped expand the bank into southern Africa’s leading financial institution before and during the Anglo-Boer War.

Rhodes banked with the Standard, and eventually he and Michell became friends. Michell came to admire Rhodes as “a great man”, and worked hard to promote Rhodes’s reputation in South Africa and Rhodesia.

When Rhodes died in 1902, Michell left banking and spent the rest of his life promoting and protecting Rhodes’s legacy, also writing the first Rhodes biography, becoming chairman of De Beers Consolidated Mines, and playing a key role in the Rhodes Scholarship programme.

Steyn tells us Michell was a committed diarist and letter writer, and was able to comment on many of the issues and the people of the day.

This looks interesting.

Botha, Smuts and the First World War, by Antonio Garcia and Ian van der Waag (Jonathan Ball Publishers)

The ground of Smuts, Botha and World War 1 seems to have been comprehensively covered, most recently by Richard Steyn, who is the author of Jan Smuts: Unafraid of greatness and Louis Botha: A man apart.

However, it has been welcomed by historians, with Professor Gary Sheffield of the University of Wolverhampton, Kings College London and the University of Buckingham writing: “The authors, by placing the SA experience into the wider context of the war effort of the British Empire, have written a book that is relevant to global as well as national history”, describing them as having taken an innovative approach.

Another reviewer, Professor Alex Mouton of Unisa, says Botha and Smuts’s military and political careers have until now not been covered in comprehensive fashion, and that there is a significant gap in the historiography…” which this book has plugged.

Commando – A Boer journal of the Anglo-Boer War, by Deneys Reitz (Jonathan Ball Publishers)

In 1899, aged just 17, Deneys Reitz joined a commando and rode off to war. He was well connected, being the son of the former Orange Free State president FW Reitz, and becoming a protégé of Jan Smuts.

He turned up wherever the action was, and kept a journal. He was with Smuts in Namaqualand when the peace was declared. After the war he became a bittereinder, refusing to swear allegiance to King Edward VII, and going into exile in Madagascar, along with a brother and their father.

While in Madagascar, and aged just 21, he wrote the manuscript of Commando, based on his war journals. Eventually, desperately ill with malaria, he was persuaded to return to what was now the Union of South Africa by Smuts’s wife Isie, who nursed him back to health.

The manuscript, written in Dutch, was translated into English and edited and abridged, to be published by Faber & Faber in 1929. This edition reportedly omitted negative remarks about the British, notably Lord Kitchener.

Now, nearly 100 years later, Emeritus Professor Fransjohan Pretorius of the University of Pretoria, has retrieved and annotated the original manuscript, which runs to 1 147 pages, and Jonathan Ball Publishers has published it, once again in English.

I loved the Faber& Faber version for its freshness and youth and first-hand account of extraordinary times. I look forward to reading this edition too.