THESE are among the trove of books that arrived on my desk this month. Most have not yet been read. Some will be reviewed in full later. The top four are from Exclusive Books’s top reads for October. – Vivien Horler

Farm Killings in South Africa, by Nechama Brodie (Kwela Books)

Killings on farms account for less than half a percent of all murders reported in SA every year, and yet they are freighted with disproportionate weight in the national narrative on violence.

Having trawled through innumerable news reports, data, law cases and expert research about violence on farms, journalist Dr Nechama Brodie tells us that between April 2020 and March 2021 the police recorded 19 972 murders across the country – a terrifying average of 55 a day.

Yet farm murders make up a tiny proportion of violent acts. So why write a book on the subject, Brodie asks.

She describes the murder of 21-year-old farm manager Brendin Horner near Senekal on October 1, 2020 as a flashpoint, “a flare that highlighted the deepest fissures carved out by rage and simmering anger, a conflict about who belonged, about who got to feel safe”.

Brodie has been working on what she calls a broad homicide research project for almost 10 years, only to discover the growing claims of “white genocide” in SA were simply not true.

She discusses how South Africans see violence and each other, “and it imagines what we might learn if we took off the blinkers of our own prejudices and expectations and tried to understand these crimes as they are, not as politicians or social media accounts proclaim them to be”.

The very first section, which refers to Horner’s killing and then summarises the direction the book is going, is rather dry, but persevere – the second section about the land, and how white farming colonists removed San, Khoena (apparently the term Khoi is no longer used) and later other black land occupiers, is fascinating.

She sums up this section: “As a starting point to discussing the nature of violence and death on farms in South Africa, we need to dispense with the singular narrative of  heroic pioneers and acknowledge that in their very creation, farms began as places of violence.”

The Quality of Mercy, by Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu (Penguin Books)

Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu is a Zimbabwean-born writer of dazzling accomplishment. She won the Sunday Times fiction prize in 2019 for the bestseller The Theory of Flight. She is a winner of Yale University’s 2022 Windham Campbell prize, is a writer, filmmaker and an academic with a PhD from Stanford University, and directed and edited the award-winning short film Graffiti.

The Quality of Mercy is the third in a trilogy, starting with The Theory of Flight (now a school setwork) and followed by The History of Man, but the blurb on the cover says this novel stands alone as it describes the history of a country moving from a colonial to a postcolonial state.

It tells the story of Spokes Moloi, a policeman who is about to retire and whose final crime investigation involves the possible murder of Emil Coetzee, head of the sinister Organisation of Domestic Affairs, who disappears on the day a ceasefire is declared and independence is on the horizon.

Act of Oblivion, by Robert Harris (Hutchinson Heinemann)

According to Wikipedia, England’s Indemnity and Oblivion Act of 1660 was an act of parliament providing a general pardon for everyone who had committed crimes during the English civil war and Commonwealth period, with the exception of people who had committed certain crimes including piracy, buggery, rape and witchcraft, and those named in the act as having been involved in the killing of King Charles I.

In this historical novel, that same year Colonel Edward Whalley and his son-in-law Colonel William Goffe cross the Atlantic on the run, wanted for the murder of the former king. In terms of the Act of Oblivion they have been found guilty in absentia in London of high treason.

One Robert Nayler, the Privy Council’s secretary of the regicide committee, is ordered to track down the fugitives, dead or alive.

This is a thriller describing a chase and an epic journey across continents.

In an author’s note Robert Harris says it is based on a true story about the greatest manhunt of the 17^th century across New England. Events, dates and locations are accurate, and almost every character is real, apart from Richard Nayler.

“I suspect there must have been such a person – you cannot sustain a manhunt without a manhunter – but whoever he was, his identity is lost to history,” writes Harris.

This looks like a cracker.

The Last Gift of the Master Artists, by Ben Okri (Head of Zeus)

This novel by Booker Prize-winning Nigerian-born Ben Okri has an unusual history. Set just before the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade, it was first published in 2007 as Starbook, but has over more than decade been reworked by Okri.

The cover blurb explains: “He has sought to bring to it a greater simplicity, to make the political and historical implications of the story clearer…. This is a work still more dazzling and unforgettable, and more relevant to our world than ever before.”

It begins with the meeting of a couple on a riverbank in Africa, who have no idea their world and culture are about to end. On the horizon, beautiful ships with white sails are waiting.

Bamboozled – In search of joy in a world gone mad, by Melinda Ferguson (Melinda Ferguson Books)

I mentioned this memoir last month, but at that stage I hadn’t read it. Now I have.

It starts off promisingly: writer, writing coach, publisher, recovering addict and petrol head Melinda Ferguson finds the pandemic lockdown difficult, depressing and disruptive, and decides she needs to move out of the city and find a home in the mountains.

One day, house-hunting near Tulbagh she finds it, on a small exclusive estate at the end of a long gravel road. It has views forever and is perfect. Her offer is accepted.

But just days before transfer, her neighbour, whom she has not met, is strangled in the house just two doors from hers. And her immediate neighbours are tied up and robbed, although not hurt.

Ferguson is appalled and frightened, and wonders if a neighbour’s murder is grounds to cancel a sale.

Ferguson has written several other books, mining for copy her unhappy childhood, the death of her father when she was four, her poisonous relationship with her alcoholic mother, and her own appalling descent into addiction, during which she took crack and heroin when pregnant with her sons.

Eventually her mother-in-law steps in, sends her husband for rehab and removes the two small boys. Ferguson spirals into a horror story of the drug dens of Hillbrow, always comforting herself with the thought that when it gets too bad she can jump down the middle of the Ponte Tower.

But her own family step in, and she is eventually able to shake her habit.

Roughly 20 years later, living in Cape Town with her partner, Soul-Mat, she starts taking psilocybin mushrooms – reportedly not addictive – and is liberated by what they teach her.

Doors that have remained stubbornly shut through years of 12-Step meetings and therapy suddenly open in a blast of understanding. Issues become clear.

And then, quite frankly, she goes off-piste – in my humble opinion anyway. Governments have too much power, and populations around the world are battling to take it back. People like Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning are persecuted for telling the people the truth.

Popular uprisings like the Arab Spring and others are ruthlessly crushed. The people are becoming too noisy, too clever, too powerful.

And then comes this paragraph: “So – #DeepBreath – could it be possible that a ‘deadly virus’ was allowed to escape a lab in Wuhan ‘by accident’, precipitating a global lockdown? Creating a scenario in which emergency laws could be introduced, people’s movement could be restricted, and new surveillance and medical legislation could be instituted? Extreme measures that granted unprecedented control over all of us, to those who were pulling the strings of our world in order to re-establish and ‘reset’ the power ‘balance’?”

Conceding that the virus obviously did exist and had killed people, she says this is not the point…. “Perhaps I was really losing the plot, but in my desperation for clarity and answers, this notion felt entirely plausible…”

In short, we’ve all been bamboozled.

Eish, man.

Melinda Ferguson publishes her own books. Would anyone else?

 

It’s been a great month for books – I’ve been sent more readable books than I know what to do with. The first four are from among Exclusive Books’ list of top reads for September, and the rest look great too. Most of these books haven’t been read by me yet, but I’m looking forward to them. Some will be reviewed in full later. – Vivien Horler

My Land Obsession – a memoir, by Bulelwa Mabasa (Picador Africa)

Bulelwa Mabasa is the head of the Land Reform, Restitution and Tenure practice at Werksmans Attorneys, and she deals with commercial dispute resolution, mining litigation, mining regulation, land reform and administrative and constitutional law.

That’s all a long way away from starting off in a matchbox house in Meadowlands, Soweto.

The family had been uprooted thanks to the Group Areas Act, and Mabasa grew up hearing these stories. The daughter and niece of members of the Soweto String Quartet, she was forced to play the violin. She hated it. Nevertheless she ended up at an upmarket Model C school in Highlands North, an experience she found entirely alienating.

This is the story of how one smart, motivated black girl child became a fighter for land reform in South Africa.

The Eye of the Beholder, by Margie Orford, (Jonathan Ball Publishers)

Maggie Orford is a South African novelist but this thriller begins somewhere in the frozen north, with Cora fleeing for her life. Obviously something terrible has happened. Cora makes it on to an aircraft, believing she has left her past behind.

But now, including Cora, there are three women to deal with the fall-out of the horror: Freya, who is frightened but who can’t understand what her mother has been through, and Angel, who means to ensure her abusers are dead. All are desperate to find the truth.

Damian Barr, Scottish writer and broadcaster, describes this writer’s work: “Orford truly understands the transformative power of violence for those who survive it and those who visit it upon others. It gives her writing visceral power.”

The Halfways, by Nilopar Uddin (HQ, an imprint of HarperCollins)

Immigrants are neither one thing nor another. Even when they are settled and comfortable in a new home, there is always the call of the past pulling them back.

Nasrin and Sabrina are sisters who have made successful lives in the west, one in New York and one in London. But when their father dies they rush to join their mother at the family restaurant in Wales, where they are unhappily reminded of their stifling childhood.

When their father’s will is read, all is changed, and a family rift opens. This story explores family dynamics, and how the discovery of a secret can change everything.

The Rising Tide, by Ann Cleeves (Macmillan)

Holy Island, also known as Lindisfarne, is a tidal island off Britain’s Northumberland. The thing about Lindisfarne is that you shouldn’t be caught on the causeway when the tide is coming in. Apart from being potentially fatal, the costs of rescue are eye-watering.

In this latest DCI Vera Stanhope police thriller, Vera is called in when one of a long-time group of friends is found hanged. As teenagers 50 years ago the group spent a weekend on the island, and still return every five years to celebrate their friendship and mourn the friend who died during the first reunion.

Vera has to find out what the friends are hiding, and whether this latest death could be murder.

I am an unabashed Ann Cleeves fan, whether she’s writing about Vera, Jimmy Perez or her newish series set in north Devon. This is the 10^th detective thriller about Detective Chief Inspector Vera Stanhope, and I can’t wait to get into it.

The Hive, by Scarlett Brade (Zaffre)

I think I may be a touch old for this psychological thriller, focusing as it does on the relationship between social media and mental health. And then there is the strength of sisterhood.

Charlotte looks at the camera on an Instagram-Live broadcast and announces she has killed her ex-boyfriend’s new partner. She pans away to the body of a woman bleeding on the floor. And that’s not all. She wants her viewers to vote on whether the boyfriend, Lincoln, should live or die.

The camera then reveals Lincoln, on his knees, head down, hands tied behind his back.

By this time thousands are watching Charlotte’s post. She knows she doesn’t have much time – people must have contacted the police by now.

She decides to take her audience back to the beginning.

Birds of South Africa, by Adam Riley (Jonathan Ball)

If you want to go looking for birds, Cape Town is an excellent destination. South Africa has 18 endemic species, more than any other country in Africa, and 11 of them are in the Cape Floristic Region, the smallest of the world’s floral kingdoms.

This volume is considerably smaller and lighter than the magnificient Veld Birds of Southern Africa that I mentioned last month, and much easier to carry in a rucksack. I like the fact while all the birds are listed in the index by their (newish) official names, the old ones are still mentioned in the bird entry, so that we are reminded that the inelegantly named African Swamphen was once known by the much more attractive title of Purple Gallinule.

I would have liked one of those little maps for each entry indicating where it is found, as sometimes for (very ) amateur birders like me just knowing a bird is not found in the Cape Floral Kingdom can help me distinguish between two different but similar birds. Perhaps there simply wasn’t the space. Riley’s pictures are superb.

Patrice Motsepe – An appetite for disruption, by Janet Smith (Jonathan Ball Publishers)

South African journalist Janet Smith has written this unauthorised biography by going through archives, academic papers and the international media to find out “what lies behind this hugely successful, intensely private man, and what may lie ahead”.

The last phrase seems to be a reference to whether this South African billionaire tycoon (and owner of Mamelodi Sundowns) may have political ambitions because of his close links to the ANC and his brothers-in-law President Cyril Ramaphosa and Jeff Radebe.

Bamboozled – In search of joy in a world gone mad, by Melinda Ferguson (Melinda Ferguson Books)

It always helps to own a publishing company – that way you can be assured of finding a publisher. Along with being a writer and publisher, Ferguson is also known as a petrolhead who regularly reviews cars.

She had a drug problem and wrote a few memoirs about that, including Smacked, Hooked and Crashed. Now clean and in the midst of the pandemic, she is seeking a new life, and buys a dream house in the Matroosberg mountains. But then, just a week before transfer takes place, a woman is murdered two doors away.

What to do?

A great deal of introspection is needed, and this is the narrative of that exercise. And then, says the blurb on the cover, “she rescues a dog who ends up rescuing her”.

 

 

 

These were among the books that landed on my desk this month. A few have been read, others not yet. Some will be reviewed in full later. – Vivien Horler

The first five books are among Exclusive Books’s top 40 reads for August.

The Favour, by Nora Murphy (Macmillan)

Two bright, well-educated wives are being abused by their husbands. One insists his wife, McKenna, resign from her beloved job as a paediatrician, because he is convinced her miscarriage was due to picking up a virus at work.

The other, Leah, loses her job as a lawyer after her husband, unbeknownst to her, takes a cheque belonging to Leah’s company and deposits it into a secret account, making it appear she has committed fraud.

Slowly both women find themselves increasingly isolated from colleagues, friends and family. And then the physical abuse starts.

Leah and McKenna don’t know each other, although they live near each other and have come across each other in the local shops. McKenna and her husband live in a house that faces onto open land, and Leah, increasingly fascinated by McKenna, starts spying on the couple, able to see into their kitchen through uncurtained picture windows.

One evening she sees a violent confrontation between McKenna and her husband, and realises McKenna’s marriage is abusive, just like hers. Leah calls the police.

And that’s about all I can say without giving the game away.

The basic premise is, I think, a bit unlikely, but if you suspend some disbelief, this thriller makes for an engrossing read.

The Measure, by Nikki Erlick (The Borough Press)

Talking of suspending disbelief… One morning in March every adult on the planet finds a small box on their doorstep. Their name is on the lid, along with an inscription: “The measure of your life lies within.”

Inside the box is what seems to be a piece of string, but everyone has a different length. It soon becomes clear that the length of the string is an indication of how long the person will live.

Governments and the UN pontificate, social scientists philosophise, physical scientists experiment. They work out that actual life length can be measured, so people can tell if they have 30, 40 or maybe just two or three years left.

Some people choose not to open their boxes, others do and are relieved. Still others are appalled and take themselves to hospitals to have thorough health checks. Of course a “short-stringer” who turns out to be healthy could still be hit by a No 11 bus.

Soon hospitals stop accepting short-stringers for tests – they can’t afford to give MRIs and CT scans to everyone who turns up on their doorsteps. This leads to violence in emergency departments as desperate short-stringers demand help.

The whole concept is absurd – where did the boxes come from? How were they delivered? – But there they are. And once you, the reader, have accepted the premise, the book seems to proceed according to the rules of normal life.

But it’s normal life turned on its head. Insurance companies refuse to insure short-stringers. Couples break up. One couple, she with a short string, he with a long, jump off a bridge three days after their wedding. She dies, he survives. But having a long string doesn’t mean you will survive unscathed.

Some very short-stringers decide to take the law into their own hands, knowing there will not be enough time to try and jail them. Others resign from their jobs and go travelling the world.

The story centres on a group of people in New York City and how they cope with the new normal. Nina is a journalist with a long string, her partner Maura has a short string. Suddenly Maura wants to have a baby, so she will have something to leave behind. Others in a short-stringer counselling group discuss their futures.

Then the government decides to bar short-stringers from serving with the armed forces. Companies decline to employ them – what’s the point if they’re going to die soon? – and short-stringers start to become an underclass.

I haven’t got very far into this novel but it’s intriguing as it explores the way society would react to such a crisis. As the blurb on the cover asks: “If finding out was as simple as opening a box… would you open yours?”

Maybe it’s time to think about how we face our futures.

The Lightness of Air – a novel, by Angela Miller-Rothbart (Newly Media)

Helena Jablonski has had a pleasant, middle-class childhood in a Polish town, but it is September 1, 1939, and everything is about to change. Against the odds, Helena survives to 1945 after spending time in Bergen-Belsen and losing her family.

She sets off to try to reach Palestine, joined by her childhood friend Sofia. She meets many people along the way and has to learn to navigate a new world order. She travels from Poland to Paris, then to New York, to the Middle East and eventually to the Paarl winelands.

A few years ago author Angela Miller-Rothbart, who grew up in Paarl and is in her 70s, joined a Cape Town Jewish seniors association where she met a Holocaust survivor and heard her story.

Miller-Rothbart began writing, based on what her friend told her, and the piece morphed from a short story into a full-length novel. She told reviewer Beryl Eichenberger: “It is not my friend’s story, but so much of what she told me created the platform for the novel, which is a tapestry of many stories.”

The Anatomy of Grief – How the brain, heart and body can heal after loss, by Dorothy P Holinger (Yale University Press)

It happens to everyone – it will happen to you. At some point you will have to cope with grief. And grief is strange – it makes your brain freeze. “Do you need milk?” I was asked the day after my husband was killed. I had no idea.

Dr Holinger, a psychotherapist, taught psychiatry at Harvard Medical School for more than 20 years. She says this is not a grief memoir, not a self-help book and not a textbook, but offers an understanding of the unpredictable nature of grief, “an understanding that has the power to help ease the heartache of a terrible loss”.

Sadness needs to run its course, for then a survivor can begin the bitter sweetness of a new life.

 

Rewilding Africa – Restoring the wilderness on a war-ravaged continent, by Grant Fowlds with Graham Spence (Jonathan Ball Publishers)

Writing these little thumbsketches of new books requires that you read a chapter or foreword or something to give a flavor of the book – précis-ing the blurb on the cover is not good enough.

So I read chapter 1, then chapter 2, then chapter 3, and am halfway through chapter 4. Trust me, this books grabs you. Reading it only a few weeks after Johan Jooste and Tony Park’s Rhino War, about Jooste’s strategy to save rhinos in the Kruger Park, this feels a bit like a sequel.

For example Fowlds, who works a lot in KwaZulu-Natal, says how the well-resourced response to poachers in Kruger has led to poachers moving south. But  the KZN rangers don’t have anything like the firepower of the Kruger rangers, which makes them way more vulnerable. As recently as March 2020, rangers were using World War I Lee Enfield .303s against AK-47s and telescopic-sighted hunting rifles.

This book also looks at the devastating effect Covid-19 has had on the fight to save Africa’s wildlife.

Veld Birds of Southern Africa – the complete photographic guide, by Burger Cillié, Neil Cillié, Phil Penlington, Trevor Hardaker and Karin Wiesler (Sunbird Publishers/ Jonathan Ball)

This afternoon I spotted a bright yellow bird in my birdbath, and I assumed it was a bishop of some kind. But no, none of the yellow bishops in this magnificent (and weighty) guide had the prominent black chinstrap exhibited by my visitor.

So I just started paging, and there it was, the bokmakierie, which I feel I should have recognised instantly, it being such an iconic SA bird. Turns out it’s a shrike, and I hadn’t noticed its rather elegant yellow eyebrows.

Many earlier bird guides were illustrated with paintings as photography just wasn’t quick or good enough to capture the birds’ fine detail, but no longer. This book is packed full of exquisitely detailed photographs (which is how I know about the eyebrows).

Each entry has a detailed map and brief text that provides the bird’s key features, status, and habitat. I rather liked some of the categories, such as: swimming waterbirds; large birds with long legs, which range from spoonbills to ostriches; small birds with long legs; fowl birds and many more.

In addition this book gives the reader access to BirdScan, a new app that provides additional pictures, information and bird calls.

The Russian on Commando – the Boer War experiences of Yevgeny Avgustus, edited by Boris Gorelik (Jonathan Ball Publishers)

A dislike of British imperialism in the years running up to the start of the Boer War in 1899 fuelled a popular Russian outpouring of support for the two Boer republics. Two Russian ambulances operated in the republics, and the Russian Red Cross sent more than 30 doctors, nurses and other medics.

The Russian government of the day did not endorse military involvement, but between 225 and 400 fighting men joined military commandos in the republics, and one of them was Yevgeny Avgustus, a Russian second lieutenant who apparently saw the adventure in the Transvaal as a break from the routine of serving on the border with the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Aged 25, he arrived in the Transvaal in January 1900, where despite expecting to serve as an officer, he had to remove his golden epaulettes and join up as a rank-and-file burger. He was part of the Krugersdorp Commando, fighting on the Natal front where he was eventually wounded.

He stayed about six months and then went home, publishing a memoir and a number of newspaper articles about his experience. These are the basis of this book.

Editor Boris Gorelik, a senior research fellow at the Institute for African Studies in Moscow, writes in his introduction: “…Avgustus offers both keen observation and thoughtful introspection. His narrative is a series of paintings rather than snapshots. History comes alive as you immerse yourself in this memoir… Avgustus speaks to us through the years because his stories of wartime chaos pivot on the typical and the perennial.”

 

 

 

 

 

These books have landed on my desk in the past few weeks. The first four are from Exclusive Books’ top 25 reads for July. Some will be reviewed in full later.

Rhino War, by Major General (Ret) Johan Jooste with Tony Park (Pan Macmillan)

What attracted me to this book was the name of the co-author, Tony Park, author of 19 thrillers set in Africa and a former Australian soldier. So I was pretty sure Rhino Wars would read well, and it does.

In 2012 Johan Jooste, a retired SA general, was taken on by SANparks in a bid to change the Kruger Park rangers into a paramilitary force to turn the tide on the tsunami of rhino poaching.

Traditionally rangers kept an eye on the animals, mended fences, got rid of alien plants and manned the park gates. But the scale of poaching at the time meant rangers were spending something like 95% of their time going after poachers. Something radical had to be done if rhinos were to survive as a species.

And so in came Jooste, with a wealth of military and organisatioal experience to turn things around. It wasn’t easy: many were suspicious of his apartheid SA military baggage, he was in his 60s, his rangers were angry at their treatment by SANparks, and the rhinos were still dying.

I’ve not got very far into this book yet, but it has certainly caught my attention.

The Twyford Code, by Janice Hallett (Viper)

In her acknowledgements Janice Hallett says it is entirely due to the fact Enid Blyton fell out of favour as a children’s author that she became a reader. “If no one had sent their Famous Five books to the 3^rd Northolt Scout jumble sale in the 1970s, I would never have picked them up and taken them back to a home with no other books in it…”

This is a strange whodunnit – really strange and occasionally ridiculous – which has at its centre a late famous children’s author called Edith Twyford (Enid Blyton/Edith Twyford, geddit?). Years later schoolboy Steven Smith finds a copy of one of her books with its margins full of strange markings and notes. He shows the book to his teacher, Miss Iles, who is convinced that the story is an elaborate code to revealing some of Britain’s wartime secrets.

Miss Iles takes a small group of children, including Steven, on a trip to see Twyford’s home in Dorset, and during the trip she disappears, an event that haunts all the children for years.

Steven falls in with a bad crowd, and eventually serves time for murder. After his release he decides to find out what happened to Miss Iles, and believes his original copy of the book holds the key. But Steven isn’t the only one looking for the book, and the others are really nasty pieces of work.

I kept wanting to put The Twyford Code down, but was intrigued despite myself. I read it to the remarkable twist at the end.

This Rebel Heart, by Katherine Locke (Alfred A Knopf)

This looks like a magnificent novel, set in the Communist Hungary of the 1950s. Csilla lives in Budapest, beside the Duna River. The river helped keep the family safe during the Holocaust, but afterwards, when the Russians came, the Communists seized power and Csilla’s parents were murdered by the secret police. She did not understand then how her father had been behind the destruction of other families.

Now Csilla is planning to leave Hungary, but as she is about to go her parents are exonerated of their crimes. This leads to protests across the city, and even talk of a revolution.

Should she stay and help fight for what she believes in, or go and put her past behind her?

In a review of This Rebel Heart, the author Rosalyn Eves says: “A moving, magical story that asks hard questions: how do we love imperfect people and places? What is the cost of change – and complacency?”

Questions that might well resonate with many South Africans.

Bloomsbury Girls, by Natalie Jenner (Allison & Busby Ltd)

This is not yet another novel about the Bloomsbury Group – it’s about a London bookshop called Bloomsbury Books, and three of the women who work there.

It’s an old shop and has always been run by men, but after the devastation of World War II things have been shaken up a bit.

The cover blurb says: “One bookshop.  Fifty-one rules.  Three women who break them all.”

As the women do their thing, they interact with literary figures of the day, such as Daphne du Maurier, Samuel Beckett and Peggy Guggenheim.

One shout on the cover promises that fans of 84 Charing Cross Road “will be delighted”. I think it looks great.

Booth, by Karen Joy Fowler (Serpent’s Tail/ Jonathan Ball)

Booth is by the author of the bestseller We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves which was a fascinating and entertaining novel with an extraordinary twist.

Booth is historical fiction, and the Booth of the title is John Wilkes, who famously shot President Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s theatre in Washington DC on April 14 1865, days after the end of the American Civil War.

Much earlier in the century Junius Booth, an English Shakespearean actor, brought his flower seller bride to a log cabin on a farm in Maryland, where she spent most of her time either pregnant or breast-feeding, while Junius was on the road or on the stage.

There were 10 children in all, of whom six survived to adulthood, and all had to learn how to emerge from the power of their domineering father.  John Wilkes, a Confederate sympathiser who also became an actor, chose his own way and changed the course of American history.

This novel has been described as Karen Joy Fowler’s finest, and one that is a “devastating meditation on how the USA arrived at this troubled point in its present history…”

Elon Musk – Risking it all, by Michael Vlismas (Jonathan Ball Publishers)

It was Buzz Lightyear who said: “To infinity, and beyond,” the line that echoed through author Michael Vlismas’s head during the writing of this book.

In a shout on the cover by celebrated SA journalist Toby Shapshak, he asks: “How did a bullied, introverted Pretoria schoolboy become the world’s richest person and arguably humanity’s greatest change agent? Vlismas’s extensively researched biography does a great job of unwrapping Elon Musk’s remarkable life story.”

With his achievements of PayPal, Tesla and SpaceX and his current fight with Twitter, Musk is hardly ever out of the headlines. While without doubt he’s a brilliantly inventive man, he often seems to be cloth-eared and cheerfully ignorant of others’ sensibilities. Maybe that’s the source of what makes him outstanding, if occasionally something of a buffoon.

Witnessing – From the Rwandan tragedy to healing in South Africa, by Pie-Pacifique Kabalira-Uwase (Kwela)

In December 2006 Pie-Pacifique Kabalira-Uwase was in Cape Town for a Christmas gathering of Mandela-Rhodes scholarship holders to meet Nelson Mandela.

It would be hard to imagine he was the same person as the 14-year-old Kigali schoolboy who watched as a soldier pointed his gun at his mother, preparing to shoot.

In this book he describes his ghastly experiences during the genocide in Rwanda, his preparations to flee to Canada, losing all his money and ending up as a car guard in Durban.

He was determined to get on, though, enrolled at university and won the Mandela-Rhodes Scholarship.

He is now the founder and director of PEM Afurika, a management consulting company that aims to make businesses more human for staff, customers and other stakeholders.

This is his story.

 

 

 

Here are a few of the books that have landed on my desk in the past month.  Some will be reviewed in full later. All but the first book, Holding my Breath, and the last, The Price of Mercy, are among Exclusive Books’ top 25 best reads for June.

Holding my Breath – Further exploits of an ER Doctor, by Anne Biccard (Jacana)

The furore around the letter by paediatrician Tim de Maayer about the situation at the Rahima Moosa Mother and Child Hospital has underscored the appalling conditions in which doctors and patients often find themselves in public sector hospitals.

After his cri de coeur open letter he was suspended, later reinstated and it now appears disciplinary action against him is continuing.

Last week another doctor, Dr Aayesha Soni, published an article in the Daily Maverick in which she wrote: “Being a doctor demands incredible emotional resilience and fortitude, as you serve people at their most vulnerable of times.

“Being a doctor in the South African public healthcare sector often means that the emotional reserve required is amplified tenfold.”

She went on: “What is happening at Rahima Moosa hospital isn’t isolated to that hospital — it is a problem that has metastasised throughout the healthcare system in South Africa.

“When people like Dr De Maayer and Professor Ebrahim Variawa come bravely forward to point out the glaring deficiencies in one of the basic building blocks of our society, their pleas should be heard with earnestness.

“What they say is a representation of what most — if not all — doctors in the public healthcare system experience and feel.”

Reading about the experiences of Dr Anne Biccard, an emergency room doctor in a private hospital in Johannesburg, is rough enough — so it’s hard to gauge the horror of conditions in many state hospitals.

This is Biccard’s second book ­— her first, Saving a Stranger’s Life, came out at Christmas 2020 and chronicled the first nine months of the pandemic in South Africa.

This second volume also details the pandemic, but much else besides.

Even in the relatively well-heeled private sector, doctors are worked to breaking point, and various waves of Covid make life very much tougher.

Biccard’s narrative describes cases after case, some bizarre — like the male patient who reported his right nipple had slipped into his armpit, although it was back where it should have been when Biccard examined him — some amazing, and some frankly funny.

She also has a way with words. She writes about the 70-year-old woman with bleached blond hair, breast implants and an overall tan, who “looks like a pickled Barbie doll, and is about as responsive…

“I wonder why so many unconscious people seem to be arriving in the Emergency Department recently. It is like a sardine run of semi-dead people.”

But she makes it clear that being a hospital doctor is hard and emotionally draining.

If you’re interested in what life is like for just one doctor, Holding my Breath is a great read.

My Fourth Time, We Drowned, by Sally Hayden (4^th Estate)

This book’s arresting title would stop most people. Then you look at the back cover and see no less a writer and journalist than Christina Lamb, chief foreign correspondent of the London Sunday Times saying of My Fourth Time: “A veritable masterclass in journalism… The most riveting, detailed and damning account ever written on the deadliest of migration routes.”

It is about the experiences of refugees looking for a safe new home in Europe, as well as “negligence of NGOs and corruption within the UN; the economics of the 21^st century slave trade, the EU’s bankrolling of Libyan militias; the trials of people smugglers…”

Sally Haden works as the Africa correspondent for the Irish Times, and in 2019 was one of Forbes “30 under 30” media figures in Europe.

I suspect this will be a tough read, but the shouts on the cover could not endorse it too highly. Irish writer Sally Rooney described the book as “the most important work of contemporary reporting I have ever read”.

Trespasses, by Louise Kennedy (Bloomsbury)

I’ve just started reading this one, set in Belfast in the Troubles. Early on there’s a reference to the Dubliners song The Town I Loved so Well, and so I found it on YouTube and read and listened and had a thoroughly pleasant Irish hour.

Cushla, a schoolteacher, meets an older man in the pub her family owns, and is immediately drawn to him. But he’s Protestant and married, she’s Catholic and you sense trouble is on the way. In the meantime she discovers wryly that her eight-year-old pupils’ vocabulary includes words like booby trap, petrol bomb, gelignite and internment.

You sense things will not go well.

Finding Me, by Viola Davis (Coronet)

I had never heard of Viola Davis until this book arrived. Clearly I’m in a minority. She has risen to the top of the American film, TV and stage acting profession, having won an Oscar, a Primetime Emmy and two Tonys, becoming the first African-American to achieve this.

Her background, growing up in Central Falls, Rhode Island, was appalling. She was one of six children, and her father regularly beat her mother in drunken rages. There was no money, often no food, and in the vicious New England winters usually no heating and often no water. She said she and her siblings usually smelt of pee. There were plenty of rats.

School was a relief, even if the children’s smell made other children shun them. There was food and heat and a lot to engage a bright mind.

But for years she felt she was an outsider, that no one saw her. This is a remarkable story.

The Long Road from Kandahar, by Sara MacDonald (HarperCollins)

It is 2007 in the Swat Valley, Pakistan, and Raza, who is supposed to be minding the family’s goats, is firing his wooden gun at the hordes of infidels who have invaded his country. He can’t wait to join the Taliban like his big brothers. But his father has other ideas.

Meanwhile British soldier Ben is on a military base in Lashgar Gah in Helmand Provincie, Afghanistan, wondering if he will survive the war to get home to his family in Cornwall. And his young son Finn is worrying about the state of his parents’ marriage.

Finn goes to stay with his grandma, Ben’s mum, and somehow there Raza and Fin’s worlds collide. They form an unlikely friendship — but can it last?

In writing this novel Sarah MacDonald has drawn on her experiences as a British army wife, a year spent in north Pakistan and her love for Cornwall. This is her eighth book.

The Price of Mercy — A fight for the right to die with dignity, by Sean Davison (Melinda Ferguson Books)

Professor Sean Davison doesn’t need much introduction in South Africa. Born a Kiwi, he is a professor in the department of biotechnology at the University of the Western Cape, and famously the man who helped four terminally ill people, including his own mother, to die with dignity. He is also a founder member of the pro-euthanasia Dignity SA.

In the past week he was freed from five years’ house-arrest after being convicted in the Western Cape High Court of three counts of murder. This memoir describes how he felt when he was arrested, facing the prospect of three life sentences,  how he and his family coped with his house arrest, and the morality of helping desperately ill people to die.

In his foreword, Philip Nitschke, the founder and director of Exit International, says Davison is warm, trusting and kind. But “make no mistake, this is a man of cold steel rail determination”. He adds: “We all deserve a good death. The state must do better than hanging well-intentioned good men like Sean Davsion out to dry.”

 

These are among the books that landed on my desk in May. Some will be reviewed in full later.

Exclusive Books’ top titles for May include a rich selection of books by South African writers, ranging from essays from Haji Mohamed to the latest novels by Mike Nicol and Sarah Lotz and a book of short stories, set in Joburg’s Eldorado Park, by Terry-Ann Adams. Then there are The Boer War in Colour, Richard Steyn’s latest biography Milner, Genius by Bruce Whitfield in which he looks at the stories of amazing individuals, companies and industries, and Ebrahim Ismail Ebrahim’s memoir Beyond Fear.

Here’s the Thing, by Haji Mohamed Dawjee (Macmillan)

On a Saturday when my first grandson was three weeks old, my son announced to his wife he was planning to have “an Eric-free day”. She looked at him levelly and told him that wasn’t how it worked.

In this collection of essays, with topics ranging from a letter to her late father to the joys or otherwise of freelance writing and the lessons tennis can teach you, Dawjee writes an acidly hilarious  piece about how no one discusses the horrors of a new baby. Or as she says (and I’m sure my son would agree): “…there is a significant part of you that is filled with… well, at times, regret, confusion and doubt”. She adds: “You may think it’s a tiny body so it will be a small shock – but it is in fact a huge shock; one you are never supposed to talk about…” You are basically not allowed to say: “What the fuck have we done?” She writes that Baby is not a Cabbage Patch doll, content to sit in a rocker while you go about your day. No, “Baby is a seven-month-old who needs to do something but can’t really do anything”. I think I need to introduce my son to Dawjee.

Hammerman – A walking shadow, by Mike Nicol (Umuzi)

I love a new Mike Nicol crime thriller – and this one looks to have everything his fans have come to appreciate. Apparently “hammerman” is a term used by the Cape Town underworld for a hired killer. In this case Hammerman, aka AJ, aka Colonel Andre Jacobs, or “No shit Jacobs” to his subordinates, is waiting on Rondebosch Common for a meeting with a woman. Who’s planning to kill him.

Bodies turn up all over – in the Strandfontein dunes, outside parliament, in a beach house, in a hotel room. Private investigator Fish Pescado discovers that it all ties back to the murder of Swedish prime minister Olof Palme in 1986.

Looks like a winner.

Impossible, by Sarah Lotz (HarperCollins Publishers)

Impossible is a love story, which starts with crossed emails, and then blossoms. Bee has a company repurposing wedding dresses. She tends to swipe right and never knows if a date will end up as Oh Hell No, Maybe or Shag. Nick is an editor who seems to be married. But they sense an immediate connection and agree to meet under the clock at Euston station.

And then the plot twists and sends us off on a weird, weird journey.

Is this relationship doomed? It certainly seems to be. And yet… One reviewer said: “I blinked and I was 50 pages in. It’s breathtakingly good, it has blockbuster movie written all over it.”

Looks a lot of fun.

White Chalk, by Terry-Ann Adams (Jacana)

The loves and losses of young Eldos people are the theme of this collection of stories. It’s full of vernacular, humour and real-life bitchiness, like Robyn, who goes to the matric dance as an Indian bridegroom, complete with turban, because she wants to be “extra afshowerig”.

And then there’s Laurelle, the belle, who plans to be the Beyonce of the banquet, but who is upstaged by Shanice at the After the After Party, whose boyfriend plays first-team rugby and is gebou aan to hou.

My Mess is a Bit of a Life –Adventures in anxiety, by Georgia Pritchett (faber)

I thought this was going to be a comedy novel but discovered no, it’s a memoir. Georgia Pritchett is a hugely successful British comedy and drama writer with the likes of Succession and Miranda under her belt. She’s won five Emmys, a Golden Globe and a Bafta. So what’s she got to be anxious about?

Well, of course anxiety doesn’t necessarily recognise success. Or you could be anxious about losing that success. Or losing your writing touch. I don’t know.

But having scanned a few pages of this hilarious but dead-pan account, I’d say it’s certainly worth reading. And from her earliest years she had things to worry about. “When I was little I used to think that sheep were clouds that had fallen to earth. On cloudy days I used to worry that I would be squashed by a sheep.”

The No Show, by Beth O’Leary (Quercus)

On the same day, which happens to be Valentine’s Day, three women have set up dates with Joseph Carter. Siobhan is supposed to be having breakfast with him, Miranda’s having lunch and Jane is taking him to an engagement party. But he doesn’t turn up to any of them.

One reviewer described The No Show as “a truly brilliant book. It’s clever and intriguing…” Well I dunno about that, but it would seem to be easy to get into.

 

 

 

Bedside Table April

These are among the books that landed on my desk this month. All are among Exclusive Books’ top 25 reads for April. Some will be reviewed in full later.

The Man who Loved Crocodile Tamers, by Finuala Dowling (Kwela Books)

We read so many novels set in London or New York or California, and it is a delight to read one set here, in what I call the Shallow South – roughly Lakeside to Muizenberg. Right at the start Finuala Dowling tells us where we are: “The waves this morning were laced with bluebottles and browned by the wind’s relentless churning of kelp beds. Along the catwalk to Kalk Bay and on every available rock, anglers were casting out.” And: “A depressing gale blew yesterday from dawn until well past midnight. I was one of the few people braving Muizenberg beach.”

Gina is an aspiring novelist who works in a call centre. She wants to write a fictionalised story about her father, and it has to be a fiction because she knows so little about him. But she does know he was once engaged to Koringa, a crocodile tamer, and that he is buried in an unmarked grave. She wants to “climb inside my father’s youth, run away to the circus with him, fall in love: that is what I want.” Eventually she uncovers the truth about her father, a complex and ultimately nervous man.

Cape Talk presenter John Maytham said of this novel: “I am the man who loved The Man who Loved Crocodile Tamers. I am the man who loved it very much through many smiles and snorts of uncontrolled laughter and occasional tears.”

Love Marriage, by Monica Ali (Virago)

Yasmin and Joe are engaged. They are young London doctors, in love, and everything seems rosy. Yasmin’s parents might have hoped she would find a nice Muslim boy to marry, but haven’t said anything, possibly because their own match back in Calcutta was a love marriage. But both Yasmin and Joe are worried about what will happen when their parents meet. Yasmin’s parents are traditional and conservative, Joe’s mother Harriet is a wealthy, fiery feminist who once posed naked on her back with her legs akimbo, peering challengingly right into the lens. Years later the picture is of course still out there, and Yasmin’s irritating younger brother has found it and is threatening to show it to their parents. What could go wrong? This is a story of families and cultures and how hard it can be to steer a true course between very different backgrounds. One reviewer said he thought Love Marriage was Ali’s best, and added: “Ali writes like an angel who is not afraid of the devil.”

Lessons in Chemistry, by Bonnie Garmus (Doubleday/Penguin)

This novel, which opens in the early 1960s, has another feminist as its protagonist. Elizabeth Zott was once a research chemist whose all-male co-scientists didn’t believe in equality. Life takes some unexpected turns which include a relationship with another scientist, and Elizabeth ends up as a single mother and the reluctant star of an American cooking show, Supper at Six. Her scientific approach –  “combine one tablespoon of acetic acid with a pinch of sodium chloride” – proves to be wildly popular with viewers. She is bold, uncompromising, and never bothers with tiny cucumber sandwiches, little soufflés or jokes. But the viewers love her – even President Lyndon Johnson loves her. Every programme ends with her signature catchphrase: “Children, set the table. Your mother needs a moment to herself.” But the concept of mothers needing time to themselves doesn’t please everyone: along with teaching women to cook, she’s also daring them to challenge social norms. TV cook and cookery writer Nigella Lawson wrote of this novel: “I am devastated to have finished it.”

Young Mungo, by Douglas Stuart (Picador)

Douglas Stuart won the Booker Prize for his depressing but brilliant debut novel Shuggie Bain, about a young boy growing up in an utterly dysfunctional and poverty-stricken family in Glasgow. Stuart has returned to the city in his second novel Young Mungo, a story of love between two young men, one Catholic and one Protestant in a city divided along sectarian lines. If Mungo and James want to be seen as proper men at all they should be enemies, and yet they have bonded over Jame’s prize racing pigeons. They have to hide their love, especially from Mungo’s brother Hamish, a local gang leader. Will they be able to find a future far away from the grey drizzly city and the threat posed by people’s intolerance towards gay men?

A Terrible Kindness, by Jo Browning Wroe (faber)

It is October 1966 and 19-year-old William is attending a swanky dinner-dance in Nottingham to mark his graduation from embalming college. During the speeches a waiter hands the speaker a telegram. “Embalmers needed urgently at Aberfan. Bring equipment and coffins.”  Shortly after 9am the previous day a waste tip from the Merthyr Vale colliery, loosened by two days of heavy rain, slipped down the mountain to the village of Aberfan and engulfed Pantglas primary school and two rows of houses. Within two hours some children were pulled out alive, but after that there were just bodies – more than 140 of them. Working in Aberfan will be William’s first job, and it is one that will remind him of memories he has tried to bury. But he discovers that his compassion towards others ultimately helps to heal himself. British novelist Rachel Joyce said of this book: “It’s a long time since I’ve read a debut novel that moved me so much.”

 

These were the books that landed on Vivien Horler’s desk this month. Some may be reviewed in full later. The top four are among Exclusive Books’s top choices for March.

Black Cake, by Charmaine Wilkerson (Michael Joseph)

Black cake is a type of fruitcake made at Christmas in the Caribbean, featuring blackened sugar, dried fruit soaked in red wine and rum, preferably for months, as well as candied citron, vanilla, nutmeg and cinnamon. It is reportedly a mission to make. And black cake is a recurring theme in this family saga of love and loss (and a bit of murder) set partly on an unnamed Caribbean island, the UK and eventually in southern California. When Eleanor Bennett dies a widow, she has been estranged from her daughter for eight years. Before the funeral brother and sister are summoned to a lawyer’s office and told their mother’s last wish was for them to hear the truth about where they come from and their family history. This truth is expressed in a recording made by Eleanor over many hours, and it turns the adult children’s world upside down.

I’m halfway through this and loving it.

Serpent Crescent, by Vivian de Klerk (Picador Africa)

The cover blurb is promising: retired English teacher Megan Merton lives in the small Eastern Cape town of Qonda, where the power and water supplies are unreliable and the municipal dump spews noxious fumes. Merton lives in Serpent Crescent, and is very nosy about her neighbours, to the extent she goes through their rubbish. She is also a self-confessed sociopath who believes in administering small secret punishments to people who offend her sense of justice. And she’s decided to write her memoirs.

When a neighbour suffers a stroke and ends up in a care home, Merton gets the keys to her home to keep an eye on it. This gives her a really good chance to snoop. She visits the neighbour in the care home, and over time the two women develop an unlikely relationship.

The cover blurb refers to the book’s hilarity, sharp observations and brilliant acerbic satirical wit, but Merton is such an unpleasant creature the book is hard to read. On page 39 Merton says: “I hope my ‘confessions’, recounting all my own unpleasant stuff, are not becoming unbearable, because I still have a long way to go…”

Oh dear. Presumably she gets her come-uppance eventually, but do I care enough to press on?

The Couple at the Table, by Sophie Hannah (Hodder & Stoughton)

Six couples are staying at an exclusive honeymoon resort when one woman gets a note of warning: “Beware of the couple at the table nearest to yours.” But the tables are equidistant. What can it mean?

Later however Jane Brinkwood is found stabbed twice, and police have no leads. Could it have been Lucy, whose husband William left her for Jane? Could it have been William? Or was it a stranger who broke into the complex? But no one has been picked up on the security cameras.

This looks like fun.

 

Greenlights – your journal, your journey, by Matthew McConaughey (Headline)

Matthew McConaughey is an Oscar-winning American actor who, a few years ago, took a couple of months off to write a memoir based on diaries and journals he had kept from the age of 14. He described it as a collection of “stories, prayers, poems, people and places and a whole bunch of bumper stickers”, one of which read: “Sometimes the guest list needs to be for one. You.”

It was published in October 2020, debuting  at No 1 on the New York Times non-fiction bestseller list. Reviews have been mixed, from “stuffed with vaporous, circular proverbs” to “truly entertaining”.

When I chose this volume from the Exclusive Books top books for March, I hadn’t realised the memoir was two years old. I thought I was getting the memoir – what I got was essentially an empty journal, with handy aphorisms perched on blank pages, such as: “Knowin the truth, seein the truth, tellin the truth are all different experiences. What’s a truth you know, a truth you’ve seen, and a truth you tell? What’s a truth you live by?”

In his introduction to this empty journal, he says his journals helped him to understand who he was now, and who he wanted to be tomorrow. He adds: “This is your journal. This is your story. Write it. Just keep livin.”

Not sure what the Gs at the end of words have done to offend him.

Thrown Among the Bones – My life in fiction, by Patricia Schonstein (African Sun Press)

Acclaimed Cape Town author Patricia Schonstein has ventured away from fiction in this memoir in which she provides the backstory to her seven novels, which include Skyline, about Long Street, The Apothecary’s Daughter, A Quilt of Dreams and the brilliant The Inn at Helsvlakte. The text is accompanied, in the form of endnotes, with brief extracts from the novels.

In an author’s note she writes: “They illustrate how my own life, together with the ficitious worlds I’ve fabricated, correspond with each other, acting as mirrors, allowing deconstruction and reconstruction of real events, in order to fathom the complex arena into which I was born.”

She had some rich material to work from: born to a Jewish Holocaust escapee and an Italian Catholic mother, she ended up being educated in a Dominican convent in what was then Rhodesia.

She writes: “These two great religions would predispose me to seeing life through the eyes of a magic-realist. Their repertoire would alert me to the polarities of Heaven and the Underworld, Light and Dark, Angels and Demons, the Real and the Preposterous.”

This looks fascinating.

Death on the Trans-Siberian Express, by C J Farrington (Constable)

I mentioned this novel last month before I’d read it and now I have. It has a great deal of charm and humour, but I’m afraid I got bogged down in the minutiae of the plot, and I think the plethora of Russian names didn’t help.

But there were two bits that I thought were brilliant, and want to share them.

The first sees the hero, Olga, being driven home on snowy roads by Glazkov, who has been drinking. “But that wasn’t unusual on a Saturday in Kemerovo Province. The joke was that you could spot drunk drivers because they drove in a straight line; the sober ones wove from side to side to avoid the potholes.”

And then in the pub Fyodor the Dreamer ponders which is a better system of dictatorship: a tsar or an all-powerful president. When his drinking mates tell him they don’t need some “hoity-toity ponce in a crown” telling them what to do, he counters: “But that’s exactly what Russians do need.”

Fyodor explains the problem is that presidents are chosen by election, which gives them legitimacy. “Presidents can do anything they like, because it’s the will of the people. But a tsar has to remember … what happened at the House of Special Purpose in Ekaterinburg, when the Romanovs perished from the Earth. A tsar, in short, has to tread carefully. Can you say the same of our glorious President Putin?”

This was of course written well before the events in the Ukraine.

Thrown Among the Bones, by Patricia Schonstein (African Sun Press)

 

Bedside table November

These are among the books that have landed on my desk this month. Some will be reviewed in full later.

Shackleton – a biography, by Ranulph Fiennes (Michael Joseph)

To write about hell, it helps if you have been there, says Sir Ranulph Fiennes in the introduction to this biography of polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton. And Fiennes certainly has: as he points out, no previous Shackleton biographer has man-hauled a heavy sledge load through the great crevasse fields of the Beardmore Glacier, or walked a thousand miles on poisoned feet. Fiennes say he wrote this book because he often disagreed with statements in the many books and films about Shackleton and his amazing exploits, unparalleled leadership and unflinching courage. The first book I read about Shackleton’s Endurance adventure was South, his own account of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914 to 1917. It is gripping stuff, even in the formal, rather stuffy language of the time. I am very much looking forward to reading this biography.

• This is one of Exclusive Books’s selected best reads for November.

Bewilderment, by Richard Powers (Hutchinson Heinemann)

This novel was longlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize (won by South Africa’s Damon Galgut). It tells the story of a scientist, Theo Byrne, who has devised a way to search for life on planets light years away. But he is also the father of nine-year-old Richard, clever and funny, but troubled, and who is facing expulsion from school for hitting a friend in the face with a coffee flask. Theo’s options are to put Richard on powerful drugs, or to take him to other planets in a bid to help save the one we have. Powers won the Pulitzer Prize for his previous novel The Overstory, which was also shortlisted for the Booker, prompting Barak Obama to comment: “It changed how I thought about the Earth and our place in it… It changed how I see things and that’s always, for me, a mark of a book worth reading.”

• This is one of Exclusive Books’s selected best reads for November.

The Heron’s Cry, by Ann Cleeves (Macmillan)

I love Ann Cleeves’s police procedurals, both the Jimmy Perez series set on the Shetlands, and the Vera Stanhope series set mainly in the North Pennines. And I loved both TV series too. The Heron’s Cry features Cleeves’s new detective, Matthew Venn – who debuted in The Long Call – and is set in North Devon. A group of artists have their idyll ruined by the murder of Dr Nigel Yeo. His daughter Eve is a glass blower, and the murder weapon is a shard of glass from one of her vases. It turns out Eve is a close friend of Venn’s husband, and he has to tread carefully in his investigation. And then another body turns up, killed in a similar way.

• This is one of Exclusive Books’s selected best reads for November.

Critical but, Stable, by Angela Makholwa  (Macmillan)

This local novel begins with a man looking at the body of his lover in bed. She was so warm, so full of passion, and now so still. Whom should he call? The ambulance? No, too late. The police? No, never. Her husband? Oh shit. Three families are living the high life in fancy homes, all members of the Khula Society, a social club with investment benefits. But under the glitz things are not what they seem. And now this death may change everything. Angela Makholwa writes gripping psychological thrillers. This novel was first published last year, was longlisted for the Sunday Times/ CNA Fiction Literary Award for 2021, and has now been published in paperback. I do feel the comma in the title is in the wrong place.

• This is one of Exclusive Books’s selected best reads for November.

Rise, by Siya Kolisi with Boris Starling (HarperCollins)

Did Siya Kolisi’s yellow card cost the Springboks the match against the Lions at Twickenham on November 20? Maybe it did, but Siya Kolisi has been a Springbok hero, becoming the first black man to captain the team in 128 years and leading SA to victory at the Rugby World Cup in 2019. Yet he grew up in poverty, being born on the last day of apartheid, and spent much of his primary school period in Zwide in the Eastern Cape hungry. He started hanging out with some older boys, drinking, smoking weed and sniffing petrol. And then rugby saved him. He became attached to the African Bombers club, as a junior player, water boy, and odd-job boy.  He attributes his early success to coach Eric Songwiqi, the first positive male role model in his life. At 11 he was good enough to be selected for the Eastern Province Under-12 squad to play at a provincial tournament in Mossel Bay. There he was spotted a teacher at Grey College junior school in Port Elizabeth, won a full scholarship for his next six years of school – and the rest is history. He writes: “A good job for kids from Emsengeni (Primary, his school) was being a taxi driver. For Grey boys, the sky was the limit: they could be lawyers, doctors, businessmen. Even Springboks.”

• This was one of Exclusive Books’s selected best reads for October.

A Taste for Life – How the Spur legend was born, by Allen Ambor

I once got a job as a waitress at the Golden Spur in Dean Street in Newlands. The first shift was technically “training”, and they paid me R1 (this was a while ago). I never went back – and I never waitressed again. But millions of students do, and it has been a lifeline for them. The Golden Spur was the first in Allen Amber’s empire, opening in 1967, trading until December last year when Covid-19 did for it. This is the inside story of one of Cape Town’s first steakhouses, how franchising took off, how the menu was designed and how Allen Ambor, aged just 26, would tell diners his aunt and uncle were in the kitchen to create the false but reassuring impression it was a family business. He also reveals a few secrets, such as playing the Four Tops’s Reach Out (I’ll be There) at the height of the Saturday night rush. “Customers would chew to the beat,” he confides, “and it helped turn tables.”

 

• Bedside Table October

  These are among the books that landed on my desk this month. Some will be reviewed in full later.

  Scatterling of Africa – My early years, by Johnny Clegg (Macmillan)

  The late Johnny Clegg is a South African legend and now we have his own account of his youth, first in what was Southern Rhodesia, the grandson of Jewish immigrants, and later in Johannesburg. As a teenager he and his mother lived in a flat in Alpha Court in Yeoville.  In the mid-60s the suburb was home to a cosmopolitan community of immigrants – Jewish, Lebanese, Greek, Portuguese, Italian and English. Forty-five years later Clegg went back to Alpha Court and the found the area much changed, and yet the same. It was still full of immigrants, but now they were black, French-speaking Congolese and West Africans. As he stood gazing up at the block a woman on a third-floor balcony recognised him and shouted: “Le Zulu blanc!” A circle of sorts had been closed. This looks to be a really good read and I’m looking forward to it.

   

  This is one of Exclusive Books’s top 40 books for October.

The Reading List, by Sara Nisha Adams (HarperCollins)

It can be hard for immigrants to connect with their grandchildren, especially when they speak a different language. Author Sara Nisha Adams, whose parents are Indian and English, says this novel was partly inspired by her grandfather who was able to forge a relationship with her through books and reading. It tells of Aleisha, an anxious London teenager who finds solace in the Harrow Road Library. One day she comes across a crumpled reading list tucked into a book and, at a time when she needs to be transported away from her problems, the stories are a comfort. And then she meets Mukesh at the library, an elderly man who is anxious to bond with his book-loving granddaughter, and Aleisha shares the booklist with him. They become an unlikely but supportive book club of two. (The books on the list? To Kill a Mocking Bird, Rebecca, The Kite Runner, Life of Pi, Pride and Prejudice, Little Women, Beloved and A Suitable Boy.)

• This is one of Exclusive Books’s top 40 books for October.

 

More than I Love my Life, by David Grossman (Jonathan Cape)

Gili and her family are celebrating the 90^th birthday of her grandmother Vera on the Israeli kibbutz where Vera lives. Vera’s daughter Nina arrives for the party, which complicates things. Nina’s relationships with her mother, Gili and Gili’s father have never run smoothly; Nina rejected her mother when she was just 15, and abandoned both Gili and her dad when Gili was a baby. There is a back story: many years before, Vera was held and tortured on the remote island of Goli Otok, part of the former Yugoslavia. With Vera’s first husband also a prisoner , a very young Nina was left to fend for herself, which has sent echoes down the years and bedeviled every relationship Nina has had. Now, determined to understand what lies behind her mother’s apparent indifference, Gili and her family travel to Goli Otok to see if they can unravel the secrets. David Grossman won the International Booker Prize for his novel A Horse Walks into a Bar, which was written in Hebrew and then translated into English (as was More than I Love my Life).

• This is one of Exclusive Books’s top 40 books for October.

The Fire Portrait, by Barbara Mutch (Allison & Busby Ltd)

I thoroughly enjoyed Barbara Mutch’s first novel, The Girl from Simon’s Bay, about love and the Group Areas Act in Simon’s Town. This novel follows the fortunes of an Englishwoman, Frances McDonald, who settles in the Boland where she embarks on a marriage of convenience. She does her best to integrate into the community, and paints wonderful works of art of the surrounding landscapes.  Then her husband enlists to fight for the Allies in World War II, and her neighbours once again shun her. She happens to meet a former love, and everything seems briefly wonderful, until a fire destroys the life she has built. Back she goes to London, where a one of her paintings sends her life in a new direction.

• This is one of Exclusive Books’s top 40 books for October.

 

Rediscover Your Self-Confidence  – 7 steps to a new you, by Rolene Strauss (Tafelberg)

If you look at pictures of Rolene Strauss, who became both Miss South Africa and Miss World in 2014, you see a radiantly beautiful young woman with the world at her feet. But apparently she was not as confident as she looked. Six years before that she had been 16 years old, a leggy Afrikaans-speaking tomboy from Volksrust who had been given the opportunity of a lifetime: she had been scouted at a modelling competition and offered a three-month contract with the Elite Models head office in Paris. But before she flew to Paris, she had to meet a model agent in Pretoria who took her hip measurement and announced with a raised eyebrow: “It’s 95cm. We’ll have to get it down to at least 90cm, little lady.” And with that, some of Strauss calls her “breezy, natural self-confidence” began to fade. Years later, with a medical degree, the Miss World title, a husband and a son, she realised she had to do something about her poor self-confidence. Her efforts to sort herself out have led to her becoming a mentor, and to this book. It is dedicated to “you who are ready to rediscover your self-confidence”.

White Trash – My year as a high-class call girl, by Terry Angelos (Melinda Ferguson Books)

Terry Angelos’s life today could not be more proper: she is a visual artist living in Durban, married to her soulmate with three grown-up children and a pug called Juniper. But when she was 19 she was living a very different life in London – taking drugs and selling sex. Her early years were spent in Rhodesia and she describes herself as strong-willed, fearless, curious, racist and entitled. Later the family emigrated to South Africa, and Angelos didn’t fit in at all. At 19, after two years of a fine arts degree, she headed off to London in search of adventure, and found work as a hostess in a club. Initially it was fine: cheap champagne, a bit of pawing and groping, lots sexual banter – and easy money. But more was of course expected. Looking back she can’t remember the first time she exchanged a sexual favour for money. But within eight months of her arrival in the UK, her life had spiraled into degradation, to the point where she seriously considered suicide. And then, through a serendipitous meeting, she found God – or God found her – and her life changed. Don’t be put off by the religious angle, Angelos writes well and this is not a happy-clappy book. But it does serve as a warning of what can happen to headstrong young people heading off to find themselves in the big wide world.

Frontline, by Dr Hilary Jones (Welbeck)

Frontline is a readable saga about life in the trenches and in the field hospitals of World War I, and centres on a pair of very young British lovers, Grace, a member of the landed gentry, and Will, a London dockworker. (The couple is of course not to be confused with the Will & Grace of the American TV soap.) Grace is headstrong and determined, and becomes the first of her family to go to war, as a nurse. Excitement and patriotism see Will enlist, and he becomes a stretcher bearer, his life always on the line. Through their work the pair meet in a hospital, and fall in love. They are painfully aware of the death and destruction around them, and the fact there are no guarantees either will see out the war alive. Even if they do, will their very different stations in life allow them to stay together? And then, just when it looks as though the war is heading towards an Allied victory, people start falling sick and dying from a strange illness that becomes known as the Spanish flu. I was initially put off by the fact that the author felt it was appropriate to tell us on the cover that she is a doctor, and by the cover shout from the infamous Jeffrey Archer. But it’s full of bloody and gritty detail, a good read and I enjoyed it.