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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Looks intriguing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This looks fun.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This looks interesting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

These are among the books that landed on my desk this month. The top three – Moederland, by Cato Pedder; The Most Fun We Ever Had, by Claire Lombardo; and Mr Einstein’s Secretary, by Matthew Reilly – are among Exclusive Books’s top reads for June. Some of them will be reviewed in full later. – Vivien Horler

Moederland – Nine Daughters of South Africa, by Cato Pedder (John Murray)

Despite its title, Moederland is written in English by the British-born great-granddaughter of former SA prime minister Jan Smuts.

It looks at the stories of nine women across four centuries of South Africa’s history: Krotoa, a Khoikhoi translator for the Dutch East India Company; Angela of Bengal, a former slave; Elsje, a German child immigrant who was married at 13 and had her first child at 15; Anna, who was mistress of Vergelegen in the 1700s; Margaretha, a farmer who resisted the abolition of slavery; another Anna who trekked; Isie, wife of Jan Smuts; Cato, the author’s grandmother; and Petronella, the author’s aunt, who fell in love across the colour bar.

Pedder writes she is named after her grandmother, Smuts’s daughter Catharina, who too was called Cato (pronounced Cuh-too, not Kate-o). She says in her prologue that this name ensures “…I am forever connected to a country 6 000 miles from home, to a culture freighted with shame”.

This history has been reviewed on The Books Page website by Annamia van den Heever, but I’m mentioning it here as I have just received it and it is one of Exclusive Books’s top reads for the month.

Mr Einstein’s Secretary, by Matthew Reilly (Orion)

This is a novel by a best-selling thriller writer. It is the story of the fictitious Hanna Fisher who was born in 1902 and lived through many tumultuous events of the first half of the 20^th century.

The cover blurb tells us that all Hanna wants to do is study physics under Albert Einstein, but in 1919 her life is turned upside down, and she is flung into a new life as a secretary, a scientist, a sister and a spy.

Hanna meets racist gangs in Berlin, gangsters in New York City, works with some of the greatest and most egregious minds of the 20^th century, goes through some terrible times, and desperately tries to stay alive.

This novel, described by the Guardian as “a thrilling, action-packed adventure from cover to cover”, looks like a blockbuster of note.

The Most Fun We Ever Had, by Claire Lombardo (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)

There is an old adage that novelists should write about what they know, and in this debut novel Claire Lombardo obviously took that to heart. Her book is about a family of two parents and four grown daughters, and in her acknowledgements she thanks her siblings, three sisters and a brother to whom she says she owes a great deal.

This novel tells the family saga of David and Marilyn, he a Chicago GP and she a housewife and later hardware store owner, and their four daughters. The story loops forward and back between the past of the milestones of the couple’s relationship, and the present, which sees all four sisters going through varying degrees of crisis.

So far it’s a wonderful warm novel, and I’m loving it.

Crash and Burn – A CEO’s crazy adventures in the SA airline industry, by Glenn Orsmond (Jonathan Ball Publishers)

One of the problems in the airline industry is that it attracts people who love aeroplanes – hence, too many pilots and not enough accountants end up running things.

That’s the view of chartered accountant Glenn Orsmond, who was CEO of Comair twice and the founding CEO of 1time. After 30 years in the airline industry, he was the boss under whose watch in 2022, in the wake of Covid, Comair crashed and burned.

Shareholders, lenders and suppliers lost money, employees – including Orsmond himself – lost their jobs, and thousands of travellers lost the fares they had paid.

Orsmond’s career in aviation began in 1991 with Bop Air, the national airline of the ostensibly independent homeland of Bophuthatswana. Soon after the homeland’s reintegration into South Africa, Bop Air applied for a licence to operate in SA proper, facing competition from SAA, Flitestar, Comair and Nationwide.

This looks like a rollicking account of a career and a really interesting book.

Saltblood, by Francesca de Tores (Bloomsbury/ Jonathan Ball)

In 1685, in Portsmouth, baby Mary Read is born as her half-brother is dying. Her mother makes the split-second decision to turn Mary into Mark, so she will continue to collect his inheritance.

Mary becomes a footman in a great house and later joins the navy, but being a woman aboard a ship is a dangerous thing to be. Eventually she becomes a pirate.

The novel opens in 1721, with the pirate Mary/Mark in gaol, condemned to the gallows. It appears Mary Read was a real historic character.

Saltblood has had some ecstatic reviews, such as “a complete triumph. A glittering jewel of a novel; a treasure chest of delight”, but the one I liked best was: “Master and Commander meets Thelma & Louise”. Which sounds promising.

Birds of Greater Southern Africa, a Helm Field Guide, by Keith Barnes, Terry Stevenson and John Fanshawe; illustrated by John Gale and Brian Small (Sunbird Publishers)

This is a magnificent tome, beautifully illustrated and featuring thousands of birds – resident, breeding and migrants, as well as vagrant species – found in nine African countries: South Africa, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Zambia, Malawi, Mozambique, Botswana, Lesotho and Eswatini.

It also includes birds found in the waters of the Mozambique Channel, the African sector of Antarctica, the Southern Ocean and the islands of these waters including Tristan da Cunha and the Prince Edward Islands.

There are maps, and discussions about landscapes and habitats. Each entry includes  pictures, physical descriptions of the bird concerned, the difference between adult and immature birds, their status and habitat, and the sounds they make.

Only one caveat: this is a field guide but you might need a porter – it weighs a ton (about 1kg).