Bedside Table Books for May

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These are among the books that landed on my desk this month, and it’s been a fabulous haul. The first three – Blood’s Inner Rhymes, The Tell and A Mouth Full of Salt – (along with The Wild Dogs, which will be reviewed on Sunday, May 25) are from Exclusive Books’s top reads for May. Some of these books will be reviewed in full later. – Vivien Horler

Blood’s Inner Rhymes, by Antjie Krog (Penguin Books)

This title is referred to as “an autobiographical novel”, so obviously based on fact and yet leaving the author some space to work.

It begins with Antjie Krog back from a year-long stint overseas, and driving through her beloved Free State to visit her elderly mother, the now late Afrikaans writer Dot Serfontein, on the farm.

Her mother is in her 90s and needs carers, but her mind is sharp, and mother and daughter bond once again.

Serfontein takes Krog aback with a direct question the morning after she arrives: “Do you shit in the mornings or later in the day?”

She then explains – there has been no water for a week, and morning shitters go to the farmhouse for ablutions. But if she’s a late-afternoon shitter, then she’ll clash with the rest of the family’s needs.

In her new book Krog writes about her relationship with her mother – Krog is one of five children – and her reflections on the fact they’re two writers within the same family. She looks at cultural heritage, including the Boer War, ageing, as well as land ownership and race.

The blurb on the back tells us this is Krog’s “most personal book, as well as the most universal”.

Krog is best known as a writer for her personal account of covering the Truth and Reconciliation Commissin hearings, Country of My Skull, as a journalist.

She has won pretty well every major SA literary prize, including the Eugene Marais Prize, the Hertzog Prize, the Alan Paton Award and the Olive Schreiner Prize.

I am very much looking forward to reading this.

The Tell – A memoir, by Amy Griffin (Ebury Press)

This is the story of a secret Amy Griffin kept for decades, one she had buried so deeply she didn’t even know it was there.

“Most of us carry secrets: things that we were told not to reveal or things we simply couldn’t…”

She says, in her author’s note: “Now I understand that the telling is the medicine – not the cause of shame but the thing that heals it.”

Griffin writes that her thing was running. “I ran in the mornings and in the afternoons, and I ran at night… with no one around, I felt free … like I’d arrived at a place where nobody could touch me.”

She grew up, she went to college, she worked, she married and had children, and still she ran. And did everything she could to show how perfect her life was.

But was there something she was running from?

This is an extraordinary story of abuse about which she had no idea. I’ve read of this before, notably in Jane Smiley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1991 novel A Thousand Acres, and it seems to me so incredibly unlikely. And yet it clearly is not.

While full of pain and suffering, this memoir is also beautifully written and is ultimately uplifting.

A Mouth Full of Salt, by Reem Gaafar (Saqi Books)

With the war in Ukraine, Israel and the uptick in the decades-long conflict between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, it is easy for many of us, and the wider non-African world, to forget about the devasting civil war in Sudan.

Not so easy if you’re Sudanese.

In this debut novel Reem Gaafar, now based in Canada along with her husband and sons, writes of village life along the Nile in Sudan, a river that brings life but also takes it away.

It begins with the search for an eight-year-old boy who was swimming in the river with friends, and then was snatched by a current.

Sixteen-year-old Fatima watches the search for the child, and muses: “The Nile was a trap that attracted, ensnared and buried all at once. It took as much as it gave them and more. The river brought them life. But the river was not their friend.”

The disappearance of the boy is only the first chapter of a series of disasters. Soon after the animals start dying of a mysterious illness and the date plantations burn down. The village thinks back to a long-buried secret – could this be the source of the trouble?

Meanwhile in the capital Khartoum, a single mother tries to make her way in a society that has no interest in women making their way. Now she needs to go back to the village and face both her former neighbours and the river that took so much.

Proteas of the Fynbos, by John Manning, photographs by Colin Paterson-Jones (Struik Nature)

Proteas are famed for their long lives, with the seeds of pincushion proteas known to survive in the soil for up to 80 years, but they can do better than that.

Seeds of the tree pincushion Leucospermum concarpodendron, along with a few other labelled packets of seeds, were tucked into a notebook by the Dutch merchant Jan Teerlink, but never reached Holland.

Instead the notebook was seized as a prize of war by the Royal Navy in 1803, and languished undisturbed in the British National Archives until it was discovered in 2005.

The next year botanists managed to germinate one of the eight 203-year-old seeds of the tree pincushion, and the plant is now thriving at the Royal Botanic Gardens, at Kew in London.

How’s that for a story of resilience?

This tale is recounted in this splendid full-colour guide, whose pictures give the lie to the belief that fynbos is a bit dull.

Over 90% of South Africa’s proteas are restricted to the fynbos of the Cape Floristic Region, which stretches from Nieuwoudtville in the west to Gqeberha in the east, but are found mostly in the mountains and coastal lowlands of the extreme south-west of the country.

Proteas are threatened, with more than 180 proteas, half the species in the country, being Red Listed.

This guide is comprehensive but small enough to be carried in a   backpack. It is a companion volume to Manning’s Ericas of the Fynbos.

Led by Shepherds, by Jeffrey Rakabe (Jacana)

I do some editing for an Eastern Cape newspaper, and every December-January and June-July I read articles about the summer and winter initiation ceremonies.

They seldom make cheerful reading.

Jeffrey Shepherd’s memoir is not an Eastern Cape one – he is from Lebowa in Limpopo, and it would seem many of the details, except of course the central one, are different.

For one thing, he was 12 when he went “to the mountain”, technically illegally young in the Eastern Cape, and he had not had a medical. His mother was unhappy, but his grandmother told her: “How can you not be proud?” And so off he went.

He survives, more or less intact, and many years later, as a student in Johannesburg, discovers books and the delights of the Johannesburg Public Library (closed in 2021 and partially reopened in March).

Caring women, including his mother, his partner and a librarian, encourage him to investigate links between the initiation rite he experienced which was full of misogynistic language, and the scourge of gender-based violence in South Africa.

This looks like an eye-opener.

 

Don’t underestimate a woman’s sense of justice, however powerless she appears

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Review: Vivien Horler

The Lions’ Den, by Iris Mwanza (Canongate/DoubleDay)

It isn’t a good thing to be “deviant” in Zambia. To this day, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people face 15 years’ imprisonment – or possibly life.

Wikipedia says: “LGBTQ persons are subjected to human rights violations by police and authorities. Subject to arbitrary arrest and detentions, they suffer violence and abuse in custody.”

In South Africa we have our problems, but also some constitutional rights to be proud of. It’s hard to believe a fellow SADC country can still enshrine such mediaeval laws, which date back to the legal system of Britain, its colonial occupier until 1964.

But Britain, along with us and most of the Western world, has moved on.

All of which is a rather clunky introduction to a review of an extremely readable novel. The Lions’ Den, which begins in 1990, is about a nervous yet brave young Zambian barrister, Grace Zulu, who is thrilled to get her first case but discovers she got it only because no one else will touch it. Continue reading →

Gripping new look at the horror of the amaXhosa cattle killing

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Review: Vivien Horler

In Search of Nongqawuse, by Treive Nicholas (Kwela)

That’s a real picture of Nongqawuse

It has taken a Cornishman to shine a new light on Nongqawuse and the Great Cattle Killing of 1856/57, the ghastly story of how the amaXhosa people decimated their own nation amid a cauldron of indigenous and Christian beliefs, racial hatred, war and a horrific level of mutual distrust.

As a young man about 40 years ago, Treive Nicholas spent some time teaching English in the Eastern Cape, and fell in love with the place and the people.

This ignited a lifelong interest in the area, and he spent years researching the local history. And then, reading Noel Mostert’s magisterial 1 300-page Frontiers: The epic of South Africa’s creation and the tragedy of the Xhosa people, he came across a reference to a historical horror he had never heard of.

He had already read most of the book, expecting a conclusion of “a familiar tale of gradual colonial encroachment”, when the narrative “suddenly segued into the most unbelievable tale of hallucination, bad faith, mass delusion”. Continue reading →

Bedside Table Books for April

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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.

How story gives hope and solace to the ghosted women of Iran

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

This is a novel about Iranian women whose plight, I suspect, has been overtaken in Western minds, certainly mine, by the virtual cancellation of women in Afghanistan.

Yet Iranian women have recently made the Western news cycle, specifically with the killing of Mahsa Jina Amini by security forces in September 2022 for wearing her hijab incorrectly.

This appalling incident led to women and girls taking to the streets of Iran in protest, which filled many Iranians in the diaspora, including author Marjan Kamali, with hope once again that something might change. But no. In an author’s note she writes: “I watched as the women and men of Iran rose up to fight for freedom and were quashed by security forces.”

The Lion Women of Tehran is Kamali’s third novel. She says writing about Iranian women’s rights has been a central theme of her life. She comes from a long line of “strong, very vocal, and opinionated Iranian women who in some instances broke new ground… in other instances saw their lives stymied and constrained by a patriarchal culture, and in all cases experienced a hard-line government eradicate almost overnight rights for which women had fought for decades”.

But beginning the review this way I am probably doing the novel an injustice, because while it certainly has political themes, it is primarily a wonderful story about the power of women’s friendship. Continue reading →

You thought you killed her 20 years ago, in another country. But here she is

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Review: Vivien Horler

Nobody’s Fool, by Harlan Coben (Century)

If, for 20 years, you have believed someone was dead and then saw her in front of you, you would be forgiven for reacting with shock. But chasing after her is probably not the most useful reaction.

Sami Kierce grew up wanting to be a physician. But on a post-college trip to Europe with a bunch of friends, something happens that alters the trajectory of his life.

When Nobody’s Fool opens, Sami is a 40-something ex-cop – booted off the force – doing freelance private-investigator work and teaching criminology to assorted students in night classes in Manhattan.

One night he looks up at his class and notices a woman at the back, a woman with whom he fell in love 20 years ago on the Costa del Sol in Spain.

Not only does he believe she is dead – he believes he killed her. And yet there she is. When she realises he has recognised her, she bolts. Continue reading →

Alarming tale of Facebook’s “careless people”

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Review: Vivien Horler

Careless People – A story of where I used to work, by Sarah Wynn-Williams (Pan Macmillan)

The tech bros – or the broligarchy as someone called them – may have met their match.

Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former young New Zealand diplomat working at the United Nations, got a coveted job with Facebook for seven years before being fired.

She has called her gripping memoir of working there Careless People, drawn from a paragraph in F Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

By the end of her career at Facebook, which she had joined believing its interconnectivity was going to change the world, for the better. “I was in awe of its ineffable potential.” Continue reading →

A love story in a world on the brink of catastrophe

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Review: Vivien Horler

Precipice, by Robert Harris (Hutchinson Heinemann)

The poor news is that Precipice, historical novelist Robert Harris’s latest book, is the first Harris novel I have read; the good news of course is there are 16 novels in his oeuvre and I plan to get going on them.

We’ve all heard of Conclave, now a major film, and for months a friend has been urging me to read Pompeii, so I’m being nudged in a Harris direction.

Precipice tells an extraordinary story of the first year or so of World War 1, when H H Asquith was the Liberal British prime minister. He was the husband of the outspoken Margot Asquith, but had always enjoyed the company of attractive and clever women.

When this novel opens, in July 1914, it is just a few days after the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo, and at this stage the biggest political crisis facing Asquith and his government is Irish agitation for home rule.  But within a month Britain – and all Europe – is at war. Continue reading →

Passion – hot as well as icy – fuels this skating tale of love and obsession

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Review: Vivien Horler

The Favourites, by Layne Fargo (Chatto & Windus)

Ice dancing on television is lovely – gliding, serene, the smiles, the gorgeous costumes, the wonderful music, the balletic beauty of it all.

But according to this novel – and author Layne Fargo gives every indication of having thoroughly researched the world of competitive ice dance – it’s a savage, even cutthroat, business.

Ever since Katarina Shaw was four and living near Chicago, she has dreamed of skating glory. She wants to emulate her hero, Sheila Lin, winner of two golds at the Winter Olympics in Calgary in 1988.

Kat is 16 when this novel begins, skating with Heath, the survivor of many foster homes. Kat wants to win gold, Heath wants Kat, and so he learns to be her ice partner. Continue reading →

Bedside Table Books for March

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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.