Category Archives: Reviews of new books

This category has reviews of the latest books

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

Review: Vivien Horler

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review: Archie Henderson

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

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

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

The laaitie who became an academic powerhouse

Review: Vivien Horler

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

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

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

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

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

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

But Jansen was destined for more. Continue reading

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

Review: Beryl Eichenberger

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

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

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

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

Back home after the war, the battle was just beginning

Review: Vivien Horler

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

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

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

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

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

Growing up amid “a trinity of chaos”

Review: Vivien Horler

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

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

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

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

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

There had been loss before, but this stopped her cold

Review: Vivien Horler

Fi, by Alexandra Fuller (Jonathan Cape)

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

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

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

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

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

Glorious epic tale about Venetian glass

Review: Vivien Horler

The Glass Maker, by Tracy Chevalier (The Borough Press)

Sometimes you can judge a book by its cover, and this is one of them.

The cover is alluring, with the delicate blues and greens and pinks of glass baubles or beads. And that is fitting, since this book is a lot, but not entirely, about glass beads.

The Glass Maker is another historical novel from the author of Girl with a Pearl Earring, once again putting a woman front and centre of her tale.

Orsola Rossi is a member of a Murani glass family who defies tradition and becomes that rare creature, a female glass maker. Her preferred product is glass beads, which can be made at the kitchen table rather than in the workshop.

My Murano beads

Tracy Chevalier has played around with timeframes, starting her tale in 1486, when Venice is the trade centre of Europe and Orsola is a child, and it ends in 2019, when Orsola is in her 60s. Chevalier likens her time-scrunching to someone skipping a stone across a flat lagoon, and says the City of Water runs by its own clock.

This may sound odd, but skilled novelist that she is, she makes it work. She says she had help, however. In her acknowledgements she says storytelling is a delicate balance between clarity and mystery.

“When you mess around with time as I have here, things can go a little wobbly. That is where editors are gold.” And she says to her editors: “This novel would have been a disaster without you.” Continue reading

Old Prohibition era rivalries fuel this modern-day forensic thriller

Review: Vivien Horler

Fire and Bones – A Temperance Brennan novel, by Kathy Reichs (Simon & Schuster)

Old grudges can be hard to let go. And they can reverberate through the years, as this latest Tempe Brennan thriller explores.

This time her sidekick is not Ryan, the Canadian cop, but Ivy Doyle, a journalist and friend of Tempe’s daughter Katy.

Tempe is wary of journalists, telling Katy that “nothing good ever comes from talking to the press”.

But Katy owes Ivy a favour, and Ivy wants an interview with Tempe, the forensic anthropologist, because Ivy knows Tempe has experience in processing fire scenes containing dead people.

It turns out an old building – possibly an illegal Airbnb – in the Foggy Bottom area of Washington DC, is on fire, and there are suspicions that several people may have perished. Continue reading

A safe pair of hands

Review: Vivien Horler

Catherine, The Princess of Wales – The biography, by Robert Jobson (John Blake Publishing)

The Wales are just like everyone else – they have their family disagreements. But theirs, it must be said, are of a higher order.

The late Queen Elizabeth didn’t like it when Prince William, a former professional helicopter pilot, would fly his immediate family from Kensington Palace to their country home Anmer Hall in Norfolk.  After all, if he were to crash with all three children on board, who would be next in line to the throne? Whinging Harry, that’s who.

Earlier this year King Charles also objected to William’s use of the helicopter. When William refused to listen to his dad, “the King insisted that he sign a formal acknowledgement of the risks involved and take full responsibility for his actions, a grim reminder of the weight of succession”. Continue reading