Published in the Sunday Times

For Paula Hawkins, moving from Harare to the UK was a watershed, writes Michele Magwood

I first met Paula Hawkins in Cape Town, after the publication of The Girl on the Train. She was visiting with friends and family but had agreed to some interviews about the book, which had entered the charts with a bullet, as they used to say.

“It’s a little overwhelming, I didn’t expect the reception it’s had,” she said then. She was diffident and a little guarded, seemingly puzzled that anyone would want to know more about her. She was broke when she sat down to write the book. She’d borrowed money to stay afloat and was living in a flat in a run-down semi near the Brixton men’s prison with her ex-boyfriend.

She was no neophyte: she has a degree from Oxford and had worked as a financial journalist on The Times. She’d written four chicklit novels under the pen name Amy Silver but the last two had bombed and she knew if she couldn’t pull off the next one she’d have to throw it all in and change careers. “It was the last roll of the dice.”

Jump ahead two years. The Girl On The Train has sold a staggering 20 million copies and been made into a Hollywood movie starring Emily Blunt. Hawkins has been catapulted into the Forbes list of highest-earning authors, alongside such writers as JK Rowling and James Patterson.

She is, I discover, still a little perplexed at her success. “I’m still stunned,” she laughs, on the phone from London. “That book’s a phenomenon. They come around every now and again and nobody really understands why. It won’t happen again. That was a one-off.”

We are talking about her new book Into The Water, which was released worldwide this month by Penguin Random House. Rarely has a book been so anticipated, rarely has there been such pressure on an author to perform. I wondered if the weight of expectations was too much to bear.

“You have to develop as thick a skin as you can and shut out the noise. It was a difficult process mostly because it was so interrupted. I wanted to shut myself away and immerse myself in it but I couldn’t — I was constantly touring or having to do interviews But I met some really interesting writers, and I have more confidence now. It’s swings and roundabouts really.”

Into The Water is set in a village in Northumberland, on the banks of a river. A part of the river is known as The Drowning Pool, where witches were drowned in the 17th century and where a number of women have plunged to their deaths since. As the story opens, a 15-year-old girl, Katie Whittaker, has drowned there, followed weeks later by the middle-aged Nel Abbott. Both seem to be suicides.

Nel’s younger sister, Jules, from whom she was estranged, is obliged to return to the village she fled to look after Nel’s daughter Lena, who was Katie’s best friend. Gradually — Hawkins is adept at the slow reveal — she begins to plumb the depths of this picture-postcard village, dredging up hideous events that reach back to her own childhood. Jules comes to realise that she has tragically misunderstood — and misremembered — events from her past.

Like The Girl On The Train, this has as its main theme the fallibility of memory, although Jules is no alcoholic.

“I wanted to write about siblings and about how our recollections of childhood events can be very different from each other’s. Often those things are quite trivial, but what if that incident that you differently interpret is fundamental to the people you become?”

Hawkins’s own childhood was a happy and settled one in Harare, where she was born in 1972. Her father was an economics professor at the university. “It was your typical white southern African childhood, with a nice house and a swimming pool, riding bicycles – that sort of thing. Obviously, as I got older I became conscious of the inequality, the fact that your comfortable lifestyle comes at a high cost. It was a good time for me to leave when I did. ”

It was this leaving, at the age of 17, that formed her as a writer, she says, not so much the experience of growing up in Zimbabwe. “Coming to London, feeling like a complete outsider, like I didn’t belong. I think it’s that ‘outsider-ness’ that a lot of writers experience, you sit on the sidelines and you observe.”

After getting a politics, philosophy and economics degree at Oxford, she began working as a financial journalist. When work started drying up after the crash in 2008, she turned to writing novels.

“It’s the ordinary, everyday, rather sad domestic lives gone wrong that interest me, rather than spies and serial killers. These are people you recognise. They’re struggling, they’re not rich or famous, they’re just trying to get through things.”

Hawkins is richer now than she could ever have imagined, though she’s hardly splashing it around.

“I didn’t go out and buy diamonds,” she laughs. “I do have a new apartment in the centre of London now. I’ve done a bit of travelling and I stay in nicer places than I used to, but that’s it, really. The first thing I did when I signed the deal for The Girl On The Train was pay off my credit card debt — there was a lot of it. It was such a relief, I wasn’t in trouble any more.”

Her parents still live in Harare and she returned last year to share a stage with Zimbabwean writer Petina Gappah, who she adores. “She’s a force of nature and an amazing writer.”

Dreamworks has once again bought the rights to Into The Water, and this time Hawkins will be an executive producer. Hopefully they won’t set it in the US as they did with The Girl On The Train to the outrage of many fans.

As for a new novel, “I’ve got some ideas for characters but I haven’t actually been able to put pen to paper, I’m just thinking about it.”

Follow at Michele Magwood @michelemagwood

Listen to the podcast of the interview here.
 

Book details

• Into the Water by Paula Hawkins
  EAN: 9780857524430
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• The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins
  EAN: 9781594634024
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Published in the Sunday Times

Christa Kuljian discusses her Alan Paton Award shortlisted book Darwin’s Hunch: Science, Race and the Search for Human Origins, the impact colonialism had on studying human evolution, the latest developments in science and the controversy surrounding the Out of Africa theory.

Why this book, and why now?
In the early 1980s, I studied the history of science at Harvard with palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould. It was then that I learned how science is shaped by its social and political context and how racism affected the work of certain scientists in the past. Building on these interests and given South Africa’s role in human origins research over the past century, I put together a book proposal in 2013 that asked questions such as: What impact did colonialism have on the views of scientists studying human evolution? What influence did apartheid have on the search? How have the changing scientific views about race, and racism, affected the efforts to understand human evolution? As I began my research, I saw that the stories I was unearthing were of relevance to all of us today.

Can you describe your process of research?
In addition to reading books, journal articles, newspaper clippings and online sources, and watching films and videos, I conducted interviews and had personal correspondence with many people in the fields of palaeoanthropology and genetics, here in South Africa and around the world. I made numerous site visits to the Cradle of Humankind and delved into the archives at Wits University, UCT, in Pretoria and in the U.S. My research and writing continued for three years.

Why did scientists reject Darwin’s theory that humans evolved in Africa?
When Darwin wrote about this theory in 1871, European scientists had just begun the search for ancient fossils in an effort to understand human evolution. They had found Neanderthal fossils in Germany in 1856 and later in Belgium, France and Croatia. Many European scientists saw Europeans as “civilised” and perceived societies outside of Europe as less evolved. The concepts of a hierarchy of race, and white superiority were at play. These assumptions affected where they focused the search. While some explorers started in England, and others headed to Asia, none of them were looking in Africa.

The book shows that science is often shaped by the social and political context of the time. How has it shaped the search for human origins in South Africa?
This is really, at its core, what the book is about. Part One explores the ways in which colonial thinking affected scientists in the late 1800s through to the 1930s. What influenced Robert Broom? What decisions and choices did Raymond Dart make at the time? Part Two reveals some of the ways in which the impact of World War II and the imposition of apartheid shaped thinking in the 1940s through to the 1980s and introduces Dart’s successor, Phillip Tobias. Part Three follows scientists who have been influenced by some of the social and political changes underway in South Africa in the 1990s up to the present.

Raymond Dart believed that humans are naturally violent, but the thinking around this has changed, hasn’t it?
This is one example of how new research and a changing social context can result in completely different scientific conclusions and a very different public response. Dart believed, based on his research, that the bones he saw represented weapons and that human ancestors were naturally violent. The concept of humans as a “killer ape” became hugely popular. However, years later, another South African scientist, Bob Brain conducted similar research and concluded that the bones he saw were not weapons but that they remained because they were dense and hard to chew.

What was the most disturbing thing you uncovered in your research?
The most disturbing result of my research was finding out about the life and death of a woman named /Keri-/Keri who lived with her family in the Kalahari in the 1920s and 30s. Raymond Dart led a Wits expedition to the Kalahari in 1936 and met /Keri-/Keri as part of his research to understand the “Bushman” anatomy which he believed would provide him with a clue toward understanding human evolution. He referred to them as “living fossils.” Even before /Keri-/Keri passed away in 1939, Dart arranged for her skeleton to be brought to Wits to become part of the Raymond Dart Human Skeleton Collection. I tried to find out more about /Keri-/Keri and her family, her life and death. The entire painful story conveyed that Dart, and other scientists at the time, treated human beings as specimens. For 50 years, while /Keri-/Keri’s family and community were decimated and dispersed, /Keri-/Keri’s skeleton remained on a shelf in the human skeleton collection. In the late 1980s or early 90s, her skeleton went missing. It is not clear if it was stolen, or misplaced. For over six decades, at the Department of Anatomy at Wits Medical School, /Keri-/Keri’s body cast stood on display.

What were your biggest challenges in writing the book?
One major challenge was the absence of information in the archives. There are a number of people that I read about – Saul Sithole, Daniel Mosehle and George Moenda for example – who were technicians working in the field of palaeoanthropology in South Africa who were largely unacknowledged for their contributions, and never had the opportunity to study formally in the sciences. I wanted to share with the reader about their lives and their perspectives on the science of human origins. However, in most cases, I found dead ends and very little documentation. This is part of the process of how stories are told often from the perspective of people with power, and I found this frustrating.

What are the latest developments in this field of science?
Scientific knowledge is changing and growing so quickly, and advances are being made in so many inter-related scientific fields, it is difficult to keep pace with new information. The ability to extract DNA from ancient bones, for example, is one new area of science that is having an impact on the field of human origins, which brings together the work of archaeologists, palaeoanthropologists and geneticists. Many fossil finds in the last decade from around the world and right here in South Africa, with the Homo naledi find in September 2015 and last week’s announcement regarding further finds in the Cradle of Humankind, raise new questions about our past.

Zwelinzima Vavi and ANC MP Mathole Motshekga accused Professor Lee Berger of suggesting that black people were descended from baboons. What was your response to the controversy?
Many South Africans question the concept of human evolution. I believe that Vavi’s comment came from the impact of South Africa’s colonial and racist past. Vavi said that over many generations, the racist insult comparing black people to baboons has resulted in people questioning the validity of science. “It’s in insults like this that make some of us to question the whole thing,” said Vavi.
One possible factor that could have contributed to the controversy was the artistic reconstruction of what Homo naledi might have looked like. Created by palaeo-artist John Gurche, the image was presented as part of the announcement in September 2015 and flooded the media. In some cases, the image was used in social media alongside insults to black people so many people found it offensive.
All living humans are members of the same species Homo sapiens. The Out of Africa theory, and the genetic evidence that underpins it, shows that all seven billion people on earth have common origins in Africa, from as recently as 100,000 years ago. There are always dangers in terms of how information can be used and abused. But in conducting research about human evolution, there is the potential to draw lessons from our past, and develop a new vision for the future that recognises the dignity of all human beings.
 

Book details

• Darwin’s Hunch: Science, Race and the Search for Human Origins by Christa Kuljian
  EAN: 9781431424252
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Published in the Sunday Times

Yewande Omotoso discusses her book The Woman Next Door shortlisted for the 2017 Sunday Times Literary Awards. Plus an extract.

The Woman Next Door
Yewande Omotoso (Chatto & Windus/PRH)

I started thinking about The Woman Next Door in 2012. My grandfather passed away and I travelled with my family to Barbados for the funeral. My grandmother and I shared a bed. I remember spending time with her and thinking of her and my granddad, thinking of what it might be like to have lived with someone for over 60 years and then suddenly they aren’t there. This was the catalyst, although the final story has almost nothing to do with my grandparents. Instead it became a meditation on what it is to be old – from the start I knew my characters would be octogenarians – and to have more life behind you than you have ahead. I kept pulling at this thread and my characters began to emerge. Not only had they lived long but I realised they were people who were unfulfilled. This lack of satisfaction was further confounded by their considerable wealth and career successes.

With characters, there are a few things that arrive whole and clear in the imagination and endure through the process of writing, there are other things that are present but get pruned and still there is much that one must mine for. I first envisaged Hortensia and initially I paid attention to the failed love story. I knew there would be infidelity but I imagined her as someone who, instead of leaving, had stayed and grown harder. I saw her trailing her husband and his lover, watching them have sex, I saw her 80-something-year-old self as callous but for a valid reason – she is broken-hearted. Hortensia begged for a combatant and so Marion arrived. Through her I was interested in looking at what it is like to have lived through apartheid as a white South African and have done nothing – not even in the privacy of your own thoughts – to resist it. This is Marion.

Cape Town was always the site. A precious corner of Constantia that I would invent. This provided the opportunity to, however subtly, consider the violence in Cape Town’s history which, I feel, is mostly sanitised. So I wanted to have a very quiet sense of horror about this perfect place.

My intent was to conduct an experiment into our own humanity borne through an understanding that we couldn’t come to grips with ourselves without spending considerable time in the mire, without upsetting one another, without looking at the things we’d rather ignore. I’ve had a chance to engage with a few readers who have commented that they found the protagonists “unlikeable”. Apart from my aversion to that way of categorising people (in books and in life) I instead have a different relationship to Hortensia and Marion. I feel cautioned by their hard lessons and heartened by the minuscule steps they take to move even just an inch from the rigid positions they’ve held onto – like rafts – all their lives. In them I see myself as well as the possibility, even with no sensible map, of hope.

Follow Yewande Omotoso @yomotoso

EXTRACT
Once a month a Katterijn Committee meeting was held. As far as Hortensia understood it, the committee had been started by a woman named Marion Agostino who also happened to be her neighbour, a nasty woman who Hortensia did not like. But then again Hortensia did not like most people. She had stumbled upon the meetings by accident, soon after she arrived in Katterijn. No one had thought to mention that by rights as an owner she was entitled to while away time with the other committee members. The information was let slip. At the time Hortensia had felt that the initial omission was not forgetfulness but deliberate, and it was easy enough to assume that the slight was based on skin colour. Armed with the knowledge, Hortensia had taken the short trip to Marion’s and pressed the buzzer on her intercom.

‘It’s Hortensia James from next door.’
She had not been offended by the absence of any show of welcome from her neighbour or the other residents. They had not come to Katterijn to make friends, something both she and Peter had managed without for the bulk of their lives.
‘Wait, I’ll call my madam,’ a disembodied voice said.
Hortensia leaned her shoulder against the wall.
‘Hello?’ That must be Marion.
‘It’s Hortensia. From next door.’
‘Yes?’
This was the moment when Hortensia understood she would not be invited in. The slight annoyed her briefly, but she waved it away as unimportant.
‘I’ll be attending the meetings.’ It mustn’t sound like she was asking permission. ‘The committee meetings.’
‘Hmmm, I hadn’t realised you were owners.’
Hortensia still listening at the buzzer like a beggar. ‘Yes, well we are.’
‘Oh, well I was confused. And…’ Hortensia could almost hear Marion
searching for another gear. ‘…is that gentleman your husband?’ She wasn’t asking so much as scolding.
‘Who, Peter? Yes.’ Again this hadn’t surprised Hortensia. She’d fallen in love with a white man in 1950’s London. They had been asked on many occasions to verify their courtship, to affirm that they were attached, to validate their love. Within a year of being together they were practiced at it. ‘Yes, Peter is my husband.’
‘I see.’
In the silence Hortensia supposed Marion was thinking, inching towards her next move, preparing another strike, but instead she heard a sigh and almost missed the details of the upcoming meeting. Marion even threw in a dress code as a parting gift.
‘We dress for our meetings, Mrs. James. We follow rigorous decorum.’ As if she thought dignity was something Hortensia required schooling in.
The meetings seemed to have been created for the purpose of policing the neighbourhood; keeping an eye out “for elements”, the community librarian had explained to Hortensia. Foolishness she’d thought, and soon been vindicated after attending a few sessions. The meetings were a show of a significance that did not exist. Old women, with their wigs, their painted nails, their lipsticks seeping down whistle lines; scared and old rich white women pretending, in the larger scheme of life, that they were important. Hortensia attended because the women were amusing, nattering on in earnest about matters that didn’t matter. She enjoyed to think she was laughing at them. But really it passed the time, took her mind off whatever else there was.
There were times, however, when the meetings moved from amusing to offensive. Once, a black couple moved into Katterijn, renting a duplex not on the Avenue but off one of the minor roads. They had two children. A neighbour, an old man, green at the gills and one-toothed, complained that the children ought not to bother his postbox. The matter was raised in committee. He claimed that the children were assaulting his postbox, messing with it. How did he know this, had he seen it. No, he had smelt it when he climbed down his stoep to collect the mail. He knew the smell of brown children. Could this botheration come to an end, he pleaded. Hortensia had cursed him, walked out of that meeting. And as if the Heavens had heard the man’s plea, the botheration came to an end – he died.

Book details

• The Woman Next Door by Yewande Omotoso
  EAN: 9781784740344
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Book Bites: 28 May 2017 – Published in the Sunday Times

American War
Omar El Akkad (Picador)
Book buff
*****
It is 2075, climate change has gripped the planet and the United States has declared war on itself. Sarat, with her twin sister, older brother and widowed mother are taken to a refugee camp where the young are groomed for the Southern resistance known as the Reds. In raw, matter-of-fact prose, readers are swept along the systematic downfall of an empire through the eyes of Sarat. During her lifetime she rises, falls and seeks her vengeance for unspeakable cruelty. American War is an epic read, answering the question: “How do you make a terrorist?” The most chilling aspect of the novel is realising that while the tale is set in the future, this story is happening now. – Tiah Beautement @ms_tiahmarie
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
Corpus
Rory Clements (Zaffre)
****
Book thrill
1936: Cambridge Professor Thomas Wilde is something of an expert in spy craft, although his speciality is the Elizabethan secret service: when his neighbour Lydia, poet and publisher, tells him about the so-called suicide of her friend Nancy, with whom she attended the Berlin Olympics, and the murders of others in their set, Wilde starts to investigate. Set against the background of the allegedly Nazi-loving King Edward VIII and his bid to have twice-divorced Wallis Simpson as his queen, and the rise of Fascism in England, Corpus encapsulates the events leading WW2; from Stalin’s Great Terror in Russia, the Spanish Civil War, the rise of European Fascism, to the conflicting ideologies of good men in England. Excellent! – Aubrey Paton
 
 
 
 
Syd Kitchen: Scars That Shine
Donvé Lee (Tracey McDonald Publishers)
****
Book real
Few people can truly be described as legends; Syd Kitchen was one of them. The Durban singer-songwriter was famously mad, bad and dangerous to know: a roaring alcoholic and druggie, he came from the wrong side of the tracks and stayed there, never quite earning the fame and success he deserved. In this biography Donvé Lee has done well by her old friend. She manages to capture the appeal of this skraal boy-man, his depression and demons, his constant self-sabotaging, but also his sheer brilliance. Acutely clever – he was awarded an Honours degree in Musicology cum laude – Kitchen was a great raconteur and mordant wit. Women loved him and so did other musicians. He sang and played guitar like a fallen angel, but died before the big break ever came. Splashy Fen would never be the same again. – Michele Magwood @michelemagwood
 
 
 
 
 
City of the Lost
Kelley Armstrong (Sphere)
***
Book thrill
Rockton is a small, off-the-grid town hidden in the wilds of Yukon. It’s a haven for hundreds of fundamentally decent people who are on the run from their pasts, in need of a place where they can disappear for a few years. Detective Casey Duncan is haunted by a violent incident during which she killed a man. Her best friend Diana is harried by an abusive ex. When given the chance to escape to Rockton, they embrace the opportunity. The town, however, is run by an autocratic sheriff with his own explosive secrets. When residents start being murdered, savage passions are unleashed. While the fundamental concept of City of the Lost may stretch credulity, Armstrong, a dexterous storyteller, carries it off with aplomb, fashioning a modern thriller with a dash of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies to it. – William Saunderson-Meyer @TheJaundicedEye
 
 
 
 

Book details

• American War by Omar El Akkad
  EAN: 9781509852208
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• Corpus by Rory Clements
  EAN: 9781785762628
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• Syd Kitchen – Scars That Shine by Donvé Lee
  EAN: 9780620709934
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• City of the Lost by Kelley Armstrong
  EAN: 9780751562552
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The authors have been announced for the seventh Open Book Festival and you can have the chance to play a part in it.

Brought to you by the Book Lounge and The Fugard Theatre, Open Book Festival will be presented from 6 to 10 September, once again offering a world-class selection of book launches, panel discussions, workshops, masterclasses, readings, performances and more. The event, which also includes the popular Comics Fest, #cocreatePoetica, children’s and outreach programmes, takes place at The Fugard Theatre, District Six Homecoming Centre and The Book Lounge in Cape Town.

Open Book Festival has established itself as one of South Africa’s most innovative and leading book festivals. Last year, nearly 10 000 people attended the festival’s 125 events featuring 251 authors and it has been shortlisted twice for the London Book Fair Excellence Awards. It is committed to creating a platform to celebrate South African writers, as well as hosting top international authors. The festival strives to instill an interest in and love of reading among young attendees, while the programme is designed to engage, entertain and inspire conversations among festival goers long after the event.

“In addition to announcing the first round of incredible international authors for Open Book Festival 2017, we are inviting people to help be a part of it and launching a Thundafund campaign for this year’s festival,” says festival director Mervyn Sloman.

“Anyone who works on major events will have an understanding of the budgetary challenges and current financial climate that are part and parcel of the sector. Open Book is no different and while we continue to work with key sponsors, we are inviting people who recognise the value of the festival to get involved and support us, so we can retain our independence and continue to put on an event of the scale and calibre visitors have come to expect. You can support the campaign for as little as R100 and every rand makes a difference.”

To contribute visit www.thundafund.com/project/openbookfestival

“We are excited to be announcing our first round of international authors and have again compiled a useful guide of their books so you can start reading now.”

Author: Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ (Nigeria)
Books include: Stay With Me
Why we’re excited: Ayọ̀bámi was shortlisted for the 2017 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. In 2015, she was listed by the Financial Times as one of the bright stars of Nigerian literature. She has been a writer in residence at numerous institutions and she was shortlisted for the Miles Morland Scholarship in 2014 and 2015.
 
 
Author: Paul Beatty (USA)
Books include: Slumberland, Tuff, The White Boy Shuffle and The Sellout. Also poetry book Big Bank Take Little Bank and Joker, Joker, Deuce. Editor of Hokum: An Anthology of African-American Humor
Why we’re excited: The current Man Booker Winner for The Sellout.
 
 
 

Author: Maylis de Kerangal (France. Attending thanks to the support of IFAS)
Books include: Mend the Living, Birth of a Bridge; the novella Tangente vers l’est
Why we’re excited: Mend the Living was longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2016 and won the Wellcome Book Prize 2017.
 
 
Author: Petina Gappah (Zimbabwe)
Books include: The Book of Memory and short story collections An Elegy for Easterly and Rotten Row
Why we’re excited: An Elegy for Easterly won the Guardian First Book Prize in 2009.
 
 
 
Author: Nathan Hill (USA)
Books include: The Nix
Why we’re excited: Hill’s debut novel The Nix was named one of the year’s best books by The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, Slate and Amazon, among others. It was also the L.A. Times Book Prize for First Fiction and will be published worldwide in 30 languages.
 
 
Author: Elina Hirvonen (Finland. Attending thanks to the support of the Embassy of Finland)
Books include: When I Forgot, Farthest from Death, When Time Runs Out
Why we’re excited: This acclaimed author, journalist and documentary filmmaker has had her work translated into seven languages. When Time Runs Out was chosen as ‘The Most Important Book of the Year 2015’ in a project by the Finnish Broadcasting Company.
 
Author: Scaachi Koul (Canada. Attending thanks to the support of Canada Council for the Arts)
Books include: Her debut collection of essays in One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter
Why we’re excited: A culture writer for BuzzFeed, Scaachi’s writing has also appeared in The New Yorker, The Hairpin, The Globe and Mail, and Jezebel.
 
 
Author: Ali Land (UK)
Books include: Good Me Bad Me
Why we’re excited: Good Me Bad Me has been translated into over twenty languages. After graduating from university with a degree in Mental Health, Ali Land spent a decade working as a Child and Adolescent Mental Health nurse in hospitals and schools in the UK and Australia.
 
 
Author: Ken Liu (USA)
Books include: The Grace of Kings, The Wall of Storms, The Paper Menagerie
Why we’re excited: Liu’s short stories have won a Nebula, two Hugos, a World Fantasy Award and a Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Award. His short story, “The Paper Menagerie”, was the first work of fiction to win all three major science fiction awards, the Hugo, the Nebula and the World Fantasy Award.
 
 
Author: Fiston Mwanza Mujila (DRC. Attending thanks to the support of the Goethe Institut)
Books include: Tram 83
Why we’re excited: His writing has been awarded numerous prizes, including the Prix du Monde and he was longlisted for MB International
 
 
 

Author: Chibundu Onuzo (Nigeria)
Books include: The Spider King’s Daughter, Welcome to Lagos
Why we’re excited: The Spider King’s Daughter was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Commonwealth Book Prize, and was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize and the Etisalat Prize for Literature.
 
 
 

Author: Malin Persson Giolito (Sweden. Attending thanks to the support of The Embassy of Sweden)
Books include: Quicksand, the first of her novels to be translated into English
Why we’re excited: A former lawyer, her novel Quicksand was awarded the Best Crime Novel of the Year Award 2016, Sweden’s official suspense literature award, which is given by the Swedish Crime Writers’ Academy.
 
 
Author: Carl Frode Tiller (Norway. Attending thanks to support from NORLA)
Books include: The Encircling trilogy, Skråninga (The Slope)
Why we’re excited: His awards include the European Union Prize for Literature and Nordic Critics Prize. His Encircling trilogy has been twice nominated for the Nordic Council’s Prize. The trilogy is considered one of the great contemporary portraits of Nordic life. It has been adapted for the theatre and published in eighteen languages.
 
Author: Iman Verjee
Books include: Who will Catch us as we Fall, In Between Dreams
Why we’re excited: Winner of the 2012 Peters Fraser & Dunlop/City University Prize for Fiction for her debut novel In Between Dreams.
 
 
 
 
Author: Alex Wheatle (UK)
Books include: Crongton Knights, Liccle Bit, Brixton Rock, East of Acre Lane, The Seven Sisters, Island Songs, Checkers, The Dirty South
Why we’re excited: Known as ‘the Brixton Bard’ Alex was awarded an MBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list for services to literature in 2008. He is UK’s most read Black British author, with his books on school reading lists, he takes part in Black History Month every year, works with Booktrust and the Children’s Discovery Centre to promote reading and represents English PEN. Crongton Knights won the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize 2016.
 
Author: Zoe Whittall (Canada. Attending thanks to support from Canada Council for the Arts)
Books include: The Best Kind of People, Holding Still for as Long as Possible
Why we’re excited: This award-winning Canadian author won a Lambda Literary award, was shortlisted for the Relit award, and was an American Library Association’s Stonewall Honor Book for Holding Still for as Long as Possible. She has also published three books of poetry.

The final programme will be available in early August, at which point bookings can be made at www.webtickets.co.za.

The seventh Open Book Festival will take place from 6 to 10 September at The Fugard Theatre, D6 Homecoming Centre, and The Book Lounge, from 10:00 to 21:00 each day. For further information visit www.openbookfestival.co.za.

For more information about and to support the Thundafund campaign, visit www.thundafund.com/project/openbookfestival

The Open Book Festival is made possible thanks to the support of its sponsors and partners: Leopard’s Leap, The Fugard Theatre, The District Six Museum, Open Society Foundation, Kingdom of the Netherlands, City of Cape Town, Townhouse Hotel, Penguin Random House, NB Publishers, Jonathan Ball Publishers, Pan Macmillan Publishers, The French Institute of South Africa, The Canada Council for the Arts, NORLA, the Embassy of Finland, the Embassy of Sweden, Dutch Foundation for Literature, PEN SA and the Goethe-Institut.

Book details

• Stay With Me by Ayòbámi Adébáyò
  EAN: 9781782119463
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• Slumberland by Paul Beatty
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After months of evaluation and deliberation it is finally time to reveal the shortlist for the Barry Ronge Fiction Prize, in association with Porcupine Ridge. The winner, who will receive R100 000, will be announced on Saturday June 24.

The Barry Ronge Fiction Prize
In the five shortlisted books the judges highlighted writing of rare style and imagination, stories that chose the personal over the political, and themes that are fresh and provocative. “The words”, says chairperson Rehana Rossouw, “strike at the reader’s heart”.

The Printmaker, Bronwyn Law-Viljoen (Umuzi)
Law-Viljoen’s quiet, finely calibrated novel is set in Johannesburg and centres on a reclusive printmaker named March, who makes his art obsessively – and alone – for decades. When he inherits the thdies a friendousands of drawings and etchings crammed into the house and through his work sets out to understand her troubled friend. “There’s not a superfluous word in it,” said one judge. “March is still living in my head.”

Period Pain, Kopano Matlwa (Jacana Media)
The wunderkind young author shows she has a long career ahead with this acute, powerful book. Masechaba is a young woman trying to find meaning in contemporary South Africa, a country wracked by social problems. “Where are we going,” it asks, “and what have we become?” “It’s a searing, brilliant read,” said a judge.

Little Suns, Zakes Mda (Umuzi)
“Zakes Mda is on song with this book,” exclaimed a judge, “it brings people from our past gorgeously to life.” It is 1903. A frail Malangana searches for his beloved Mthwakazi, the woman he had loved 20 years earlier and who he was forced to leave. Based on true events in history, it is a poignant story of how love and perseverance can transcend exile and strife.

The Woman Next Door, Yewande Omotoso (Chatto & Windus)
In this story of two strong-willed women, Omotoso delicately traces the racial fault lines of the rainbow land. One of the women is black, the other white, and for decades the pair have lived next door to each other in an affluent estate in Cape Town. One day, an accident brings them together. “She doesn’t pretend to have the answers,” commented one judge, “but she forces us to examine our deeply embedded racism. It’s very clever and deeply human.”

The Safest Place You Know, Mark Winkler (Umuzi)
After his father’s violent death one day in the drought- stricken Free State, a young man leaves the derelict family farm with no plan. Two people he meets on his way to the Cape will change his life forever. The story is set in the 80s, before everything changes. “I was blown away by the magnificent writing,” said a judge, “the story went straight to my heart.”
 
View the 2017 longlist here.

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• The Printmaker by Bronwyn Law-Viljoen
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• Period Pain

• Little Suns by Zakes Mda
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• The Woman Next Door by Yewande Omotoso
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• The Safest Place You Know by Mark Winkler
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  EAN: 9781415209097
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After months of evaluation and deliberation it is finally time to reveal the shortlist for the Barry Ronge Fiction Prize, in association with Porcupine Ridge. The winner, who will receive R100 000, will be announced on Saturday June 24.

The Barry Ronge Fiction Prize
In the five shortlisted books the judges highlighted writing of rare style and imagination, stories that chose the personal over the political, and themes that are fresh and provocative. “The words”, says chairperson Rehana Rossouw, “strike at the reader’s heart”.

The Printmaker, Bronwyn Law-Viljoen (Umuzi)
Law-Viljoen’s quiet, finely calibrated novel is set in Johannesburg and centres on a reclusive printmaker named March, who makes his art obsessively – and alone – for decades. When he inherits the thdies a friendousands of drawings and etchings crammed into the house and through his work sets out to understand her troubled friend. “There’s not a superfluous word in it,” said one judge. “March is still living in my head.”

Period Pain, Kopano Matlwa (Jacana Media)
The wunderkind young author shows she has a long career ahead with this acute, powerful book. Masechaba is a young woman trying to find meaning in contemporary South Africa, a country wracked by social problems. “Where are we going,” it asks, “and what have we become?” “It’s a searing, brilliant read,” said a judge.

Little Suns, Zakes Mda (Umuzi)
“Zakes Mda is on song with this book,” exclaimed a judge, “it brings people from our past gorgeously to life.” It is 1903. A frail Malangana searches for his beloved Mthwakazi, the woman he had loved 20 years earlier and who he was forced to leave. Based on true events in history, it is a poignant story of how love and perseverance can transcend exile and strife.

The Woman Next Door, Yewande Omotoso (Chatto & Windus)
In this story of two strong-willed women, Omotoso delicately traces the racial fault lines of the rainbow land. One of the women is black, the other white, and for decades the pair have lived next door to each other in an affluent estate in Cape Town. One day, an accident brings them together. “She doesn’t pretend to have the answers,” commented one judge, “but she forces us to examine our deeply embedded racism. It’s very clever and deeply human.”

The Safest Place You Know, Mark Winkler (Umuzi)
After his father’s violent death one day in the drought- stricken Free State, a young man leaves the derelict family farm with no plan. Two people he meets on his way to the Cape will change his life forever. The story is set in the 80s, before everything changes. “I was blown away by the magnificent writing,” said a judge, “the story went straight to my heart.”
 
View the 2017 longlist here.

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• The Printmaker by Bronwyn Law-Viljoen
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• Period Pain

• Little Suns by Zakes Mda
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• The Woman Next Door by Yewande Omotoso
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• The Safest Place You Know by Mark Winkler
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Two of the four authors shortlisted for the best unpublished manuscripts are local authors – Sarah Penny was shortlisted for Sangoma Boy and Rowan Whiteside for Yellow Tooth

Of the four titles shortlisted for Best Unpublished Manuscript, one will receive the Writer’s Adventure Research Award. The award is a £5,000 grant to support the writer to travel to undertake research for their next novel. They will also be offered guidance from Wilbur Smith’s literary agent, Kevin Conroy Scott, at Tibor Jones & Associates.

Nalini Ramesh (India) and Matthew di Paoli (USA) appear on the shortlist for, respectively, Turmeric and Tamarind and Holliday.

Four talented young writers have been shortlisted for the Author of Tomorrow, the category of the Prize open to writers aged 21 and under who submitted a short adventure story. The Author of Tomorrow award was created in partnership with Worldreader, a global non-profit on a mission to create a world where everyone is a reader. Through this partnership, the four shortlisted authors will be offered the opportunity to have their stories digitally published in the Worldreader Open Library, accessed by readers in 50 countries across the world. The Author of Tomorrow winner will also receive a prize of £1,000 sterling from The Wilbur and Niso Smith Foundation.

To find out more about The Wilbur and Niso Smith Foundation, visit www.wilbur-niso-smithfoundation.org

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• The Beneficiaries by Sarah Penny
  EAN: 9780143528609
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Published in the Sunday Times

Free Association
Steven Boykey Sidley(Picador Africa)
****

Steven Boykey Sidley has, over the course of his three previous novels (Entanglement, Stepping Out and Imperfect Solo), developed an enviable line in intense character studies of people who are entertainly flawed, gloriously real and worryingly, unsettlingly familiar. Max Lurie, for whose self-indulgent podcast this latest book is named, is another of these protagonists, operating on the margins of the society in which he lives by virtue of his restless intellect, thirst for new experiences and deep-seated cynicism.

Sidley adopts an interesting stance as the author, becoming Lurie (in the first person) via the character’s transcribed podcasts and then switching to third-person narration in between. It’s a mechanism that helps readers to feel like they’re getting to know Lurie and the context in which he exists separately, with the option of combining those threads.

Satisfyingly, Sidley provides a guide for readers who may see a disconnect in these two perspectives in the person of the Free Association producer Bongani, who is at once Lurie’s employee, business partner and tangible moral centre. As such, there is regular conflict between the two characters as Bongani suggests Lurie’s potential both to Lurie himself and to the reader.

The clashing of Lurie’s on-air iconoclasm (and the actions played out in the name of maintaining it) and the relatively normal, everyday life that he is otherwise living is what makes the story compelling and intimately recognisable.

Lurie is an artist and a visionary and an idiot and a frustrating schmuck. He’s people you know — and he’s you. You’ll find yourself judging him and defending him, which suggests that Sidley’s expression, via Lurie, of the uncertainty that comes with not meeting societal expectations (regarding age or talent or gender or whatever) has touched a nerve.

Follow Bruce Dennill @BroosDennill

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• Free Association by Steven Sidley
  EAN: 9781770105218
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The University of Johannesburg has announced the shortlist of its annual literary award. Approximately 60 works were submitted, from which the following books were selected for the shortlist:

Main Prize:
Pleasure by Nthikeng Mohlele
The Woman Next Door by Yewande Omotoso
Sigh, the Beloved Country by Bongani Madondo

Debut Prize:
The Yearning by Mohale Mashigo
Loud and Yellow Laughter by Sindiswa Busuku-Mathese
Tjieng Tjang Tjerries and Other Stories by Jolyn Philips
The Keeper of the Kumm by Sylvia Vollenhoven

The prizes are not linked to a specific genre. This may make the evaluation more challenging in the sense that, for example, a volume of poetry, a novel and a biographical work must be measured against one another, but the idea is to open the prize to as many forms of creative writing as possible.

The main prize is R75 000.

The debut prize is R35 000.

A formal prize-giving ceremony will be held at a function later in the year.

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• Pleasure by Nthikeng Mohlele
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• The Woman Next Door by Yewande Omotoso
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• Sigh The Beloved Country: Braai Talk, Rock ‘n Roll and Other Stories by Bongani Madondo
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• The Yearning by Mohale Mashigo
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  EAN: 9781770104839
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• Loud and Yellow Laughter by Sindiswa Busuke-Mathese
  EAN: 9780981420585
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• Tjieng Tjang Tjerries and other stories by Jolyn Phillips
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• Keeper of the Kumm by Sylvia Vollenhoven
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British author Naomi Alderman has been awarded the 2017 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction for her science fiction novel The Power.

The Power is the first science fiction novel to win this prestigious prize. The thriller is set in a dystopian future where women and girls can kill men with a single touch.

Tessa Ross, the chair of judges, said that the book was a clear winner of the £30,000 prize: “This prize celebrates great writing and great ideas and The Power had that, but it also had urgency and resonance.”

Ross added that the judges had been impressed by Alderman’s handling of the big issues which affect humanity, from greed to power, and predicted the novel would be “a classic of the future”.

Read Efemia Chela’s review of The Power here.

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• The Power by Naomi Alderman
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Published in the Sunday Times – 12 February 2017

Naomi Alderman imagines a world in which girl power is actual high-voltage current, writes Efemia Chela

Naomi Alderman (Viking)
The Power ****

Naomi Alderman’s thriller is a countdown to the creation of a world-wide matriarchy, powered by female electricity. A generation of girls, in a world just like our own, discover that they are born with an electrical “skein” under their skin. With the onset of puberty the skein awakens and their body starts to generate volumes of electricity. They can play games with the arcs of power rushing from their fingers, light cigarettes with it and even unleash enough energy to kill. As more and more girls experiment with the power, they realise they can teach older women how to wake up their own power buried within and turn the world upside down. Especially because in men, the power is absent.

Men begin to fear for their lives and see their formerly entrenched dominance and privilege crumble. They are afraid to walk home alone at night, can no longer rule the playground and lose wars against armies of electrically empowered women. Some retaliate by taking to the internet and planning real-life terror attacks against women on men’s-rights forums.

The narrative is split between four fascinating characters who are key players in what women call “the empowering global sisterhood” but what ever more fearful men feel is a cataclysmic gender endgame. There’s Allie, the foster kid runaway reinventing herself in South Carolina as a religious icon with healing hands and Margot, an ambitious politician with a secret, who manipulates the quickly shifting balance of power in her favour. Tunde is a young Nigerian journalist recording rapidly changing, newly charged societies with some trepidation because he’s a man. Rounding out the main cast is Roxy, the East End gangster’s daughter. She is trying to cash in on the new world order and settle old scores with the intensity of her skein, which can light up the sea.

These four vastly different lives intersect fully where the crackling tension reaches its climax in the contested state of Bessepara in Eastern Europe. In this fledgling revolutionary state, the world is watching to see how far the power can be pushed and whether men are still viewed as equal citizens. Alderman keeps us on tenterhooks waiting to see which alliances will hold firm, who will survive and at what cost.

The Power’s unique premise and easy prose make it a pleasure to read. Alderman probes the psyche of each of her characters deeply, skilfully withholding key facts from the reader to crank up the suspense and heighten the impact of each of the book’s unexpected and sometimes violent turns. This exciting satirical novel is a fresh take on the battle of the sexes, with intriguing sci-fi and radical feminist influences from Ursula K. LeGuin and Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex. Its realism will certainly get you thinking, especially when the similarities between the world on the pages and our current world get too close for comfort.

Follow Efemia Chela @efemiachela

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• The Power by Naomi Alderman
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Published in the Sunday Times

Unpresidented
Paige Nick (N&B Books)
****
Book fun
Novelist, columnist and advertising copywriter, Paige Nick demonstrates her unique talent for taking the pulse of present-day state captured and junk status South Africa with her hilarious and subversive new novel, Unpresidented.
Matthew Stone is a disgraced journalist and the only work he can get is as memoir ghostwriter for ex-President Jeremiah Gejeyishwebisa Muza. Muza is a character perfectly suited to Nick’s witty and sometimes scathing satire; masterful with alternative truths and able to get himself out of prison on medical parole for an infected toenail. But post-incarcerated life is not all smooth sailing: Muza is either disrespected or ignored by the only two of his numerous wives who have stuck around, his Homestead is falling apart and he faces eviction for unpaid rates and taxes.
Readers will find many familiar and notorious characters popping up as Muza tries to trick his old acquaintances with a lottery scheme, but the sole person willing to invest seems to be Muza’s old pal Robert, using Zim-dollars. To add to his woes, Muza has been abandoned by the Guppi brothers who have now moved the hub of their business to Dubai and are not taking his calls. In Unpresidented the madcap state of South African political affairs makes satirical, hilarious and terrifying sense. – Andrew Salomon

You Said Forever
Susan Lewis (Century)
****
Book fling
Susan Lewis is a master storyteller and her latest novel will keep you up just to finish it. Five years ago, Charlotte Goodman kidnapped Chloe, an abused child, and smuggled her to New Zealand. Charlotte was caught and later found innocent in a trial that saw her win the hearts of Brits as chilling details of Chloe’s circumstances were revealed. Now, things have changed. Chloe is a “problem child” and throws tantrums, is involved in creepy chatroom conversations and physically abuses her siblings. Will Charlotte keep her promise and look after Chloe forever? It’s a thought-provoking tale that will make you question your own morals. – Jessica Levitt @JessLevitt

The Returning Tide
Liz Fenwick (Orion Books)
***
Book hug
World War II novels are flooding the market. Fenwick’s inspiration, however, did not come from history books, but from her mother-in-law. She was a telegraphist who endured the horror of listening to men’s last words, all through Morse code. It’s a tale of twin sisters, one assigned to be a telegraphist, the other a driver. A sisterly bond, full of love and support, is demonstrated through a series of letters. That is, until the day of betrayal. The harm from that one mistake infects generation after generation, on two separate continents, despite closed mouths and buried secrets. But love has a way of burrowing through the smallest of cracks. Set in Cornwall, the story charms while twisting heartstrings. – Tiah Beautement @ms_tiahmarie

Edith & Oliver
Michele Forbes (W&N)
***
Book fling
One has to be in the mood for a somewhat overly written doomed romance, and Forbes doesn’t make this easier to swallow with this being set in a dank place – early 1900s in Belfast. Oliver is a magician – an illusionist. His miserable childhood fosters a foolishly driven ambition to become world famous. Edith, whose story is, sadly, secondary to Oliver’s, is a pianist – playing in the music halls and theatres. Then they meet, fall in love, have children and live the most miserable lives ever. Dark and nightmarish – it makes you feel good about living in the world today. – Jennifer Platt @Jenniferdplatt

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• Unpresidented: A Comedy of Errors by Paige Nick
  EAN: 9780620749220
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• You Said Forever by Susan Lewis
  EAN: 9781780896052
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• The Returning Tide by Liz Fenwick
  EAN: 9781409162100
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• Edith by Michele Forbes
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A Horse Walks Into a Bar by David Grossman was announced as the winner of the 2017 Man Booker International Prize on Wednesday 14 June. The novel was translated by Jessica Cohen and is published in Britain by Jonathan Cape. Celebrating the finest global fiction in translation, the Man Booker International Prize awards both the winning author and translator £25,000. They have also received a further £1,000 each for being shortlisted.

Grossman is a bestselling Israeli writer of fiction, non-fiction and children’s literature, whose works have been translated into 36 languages. He has been the recipient of numerous global awards, including the French Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, the Buxtehuder Bulle in Germany, Rome’s Premio per la Pace e l’Azione Umanitaria, the Frankfurt Peace Prize, and Israel’s Emet Prize.

Cohen, who was born in Colchester, England, but raised in Jerusalem, previously translated Grossman’s critically acclaimed To the End of the Land as well as work by other major Israeli writers including Etgar Keret, Rutu Modan, Dorit Rabinyan, Ronit Matalon, Amir Gutfreund, Tom Segev, and Golden Globe-winning director Ari Folman.

A Horse Walks Into a Bar unfolds over the course of one final show by stand-up comedian, Dovaleh Gee. Charming, erratic and repellent – Dovaleh exposes a wound he has been living with for years: a fateful and gruesome choice he had to make between the two people who were dearest to him. With themes that encompass betrayal between lovers, the treachery of friends, guilt and redress, A Horse Walks into a Bar is a shocking and breathtaking read.

Of the book, The Guardian commented: ‘This isn’t just a book about Israel: it’s about people and societies horribly malfunctioning. Sometimes we can only apprehend these truths through story – and Grossman, like Dovaleh, has become a master of the truth-telling tale.’

The novel is announced as the 2017 winner by Nick Barley, director of the Edinburgh International Book Festival at an exclusive dinner at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

It was selected from 126 books by a panel of five judges, chaired by Nick Barley and consisting of: Daniel Hahn, an award-winning writer, editor and translator; Elif Shafak, a prize-winning novelist and one of the most widely read writers in Turkey; Chika Unigwe, author of four novels including On Black Sisters’ Street; and Helen Mort, a poet who has been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Costa Prize, and has won a Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award five times.

Nick Barley, chair of the 2017 judging panel, comments:

David Grossman has attempted an ambitious high-wire act of a novel, and he’s pulled it off spectacularly. A Horse Walks into a Bar shines a spotlight on the effects of grief, without any hint of sentimentality. The central character is challenging and flawed, but completely compelling. We were bowled over by Grossman’s willingness to take emotional as well as stylistic risks: every sentence counts, every word matters in this supreme example of the writer’s craft.

Luke Ellis, CEO of Man Group, comments:

I and my colleagues at Man Group would like to congratulate David Grossman and Jessica Cohen, along with each of the shortlisted authors and translators. The Man Booker International Prize plays a vital role in celebrating the extraordinary depth of global writing talent, opening up avenues for authors that were previously closed and recognising the unique contribution of translation. We are very proud to sponsor the Prize, and equally proud to support the grassroots of literature and literacy through the Booker Prize Foundation’s charitable activities, helping young writers and readers, and those for whom access to books is a daily challenge.

This is only the second year that the Man Booker International Prize has been awarded to a single book, with the £50,000 prize divided equally between the author and the translator. Its prior form honoured a body of work published either originally in English or available in translation in the English language, and was awarded to Ismail Kadaré in 2005, Chinua Achebe in 2007, Alice Munro in 2009, Philip Roth in 2011, Lydia Davis in 2013, and László Krasznahorkai in 2015.

The 2016 winner was The Vegetarian by Han Kang, translated from Korean by Deborah Smith. According to statistics from Nielsen Book, translated fiction from Korea has grown 400% since 2016. This highlights the remarkable impact the newly evolved Man Booker International Prize has had.

The prize is sponsored by Man Group, an active investment management firm that also sponsors the Man Booker Prize for Fiction. Both prizes strive to recognise and reward the finest in contemporary literature.

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• A Horse Walks Into a Bar by David Grossman
  EAN: 9780451493972
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It is finally time to reveal the shortlist for South Africa’s most prestigious book award, the Alan Paton Award for non-fiction, in association with Porcupine Ridge. The winner, who will receive R100 000, will be announced on Saturday June 24.
 
 

The Alan Paton Award
The shortlist for the 2017 Alan Paton Award reflects a diverse range of subjects and historical eras: from human origins to the Marikana of just three years ago, from Cape Town today to wartime Berlin. “These are books that raise critical questions about our past, present and future,” says chairperson Pippa Green. “The big question being asked is who are we?”

Under Nelson Mandela Boulevard: Life Among the Stowaways, Sean Christie (Jonathan Ball Publishers)
This is the fascinating account of journalist Sean Christie’s time spent amongst the Tanzanian stowaways who live rough under the Nelson Mandela Boulevard flyover in Cape Town. The judges commented on his “brilliant eye” and sympathetic treatment of this subculture. “He’s something of an anti-hero, not the usual macho observer. It is heartbreaking.”

Darwin’s Hunch: Science, Race, and the Search for Human Origins, Christa Kuljian (Jacana Media)
Wits academic Christa Kuljian studied the History of Science at Harvard some years ago, and has turned her eye to the search for human origins in SA, and the contemporary context that sullied it. She examines how the thinking on race blighted science for centuries, setting up stereotypes that survive today, “This is the best science and sociology book I’ve read in a long time,” commented one judge. “This book should be taught in high schools.”

Murder at Small Koppie: The Real Story of the Marikana Massacre by Greg Marinovich
The judging panel was united in its admiration of Greg Marinovich’s account of the Marikana massacre. Drawing on his own exhaustive investigations, eyewitness accounts and the findings of the Marikana Commission of Inquiry set up by President Jacob Zuma, he reconstructs that fateful day as well as the events leading up to it. It is damning, gripping reportage, the best book by far, said the judges, on this most diabolical event in our recent history.

My Own Liberator: A Memoir, Dikgang Moseneke (Picador Africa)
The autobiography of South Africa’s retired Deputy Chief Justice of the Constitutional Court Dikgang Moseneke is an impressive book, explaining how his life was shaped. He recounts the history of his forebears and pays homage to the many communities that played a role in his development. “He is a great figure,” said one judge, “this is a very moving story.”

Letters of Stone: From Nazi Germany to South Africa, Steven Robins (Penguin Books)
In this gutting, deeply personal book, sociologist Steven Robins chronicles his search for the members of his family who died in Germany during the war. His father had fled the Nazis and found shelter in Port Elizabeth, but never spoke a word about the family he left there. When Robins stumbles upon a hidden collection of letters he is able to “hear” those people for the first time. “What is also fascinating is that Robins writes of the Basters in Nambia and the eugenic experiments on indigenous people there which was the starting point for Nazi horrors.”
 

View the 2017 longlist here.

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• Under Nelson Mandela Boulevard – Life In Cape Town’s Stowaway Underground by Sean Christie
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• Darwin’s Hunch: Science, Race and the Search for Human Origins by Christa Kuljian
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• Murder at Small Koppie: The Real Story of The Marikana Massacre by Greg Marinovich
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• My Own Liberator: A Memoir by Dikgang Moseneke
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• Letters of Stone by Steven Robins
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Published in the Sunday Times

Right Behind You
Lisa Gardner (Hodder & Stoughton)
Book thrill
***
Profilers Pierce Quincy and Rainie Conner have fostered a troubled youngster, Sharlah, who is traumatised by a childhood in which her drunken father murdered her mother, only to be killed himself by Sharlah’s older brother Telly, aged 9. Telly, now 17, has gone on a killing spree, starting with his foster parents: it seems he is after Sharlah, but she has little memory of the night her parents died, and no clue as to what would trigger this murderous rage. A manhunt ensues, with all the usual drama. This is the seventh book featuring Quincy and Conner and, while it works well as a standalone, is sadly forgettable. – Aubrey Paton

This Is How It Always Is
Laurie Frankel (Headline)
Book buff
****
The Walsh-Adams family already had four sons by the time Claude arrived. He was a bright boy, like his brothers, but different. By five Claude had renamed herself Poppy, grew out her hair, insisted on only wearing dresses and carried her lunch to school in a purse. Frankel, who wrote this novel as a tribute to her trans-daughter, gives an honest portrayal of the difficulties faced when raising a transgender child. For while the family may love and accept their child, society will have varying opinions, some of which can be deadly. Frankel’s true gift is capturing the essence of family dynamics, from the chaos to the hilarious smart remarks. – Tiah Beautement @ms_tiahmarie
 
Live by Night
Dennis Lehane (Abacus)
Book thrill
****
Written, produced, directed by and starring Academy Award winner Ben Affleck, Live by Night was released last year as a major movie. A major movie disappointment, that is – comprehensively panned by the critics. Perhaps Affleck should have left the script to the original author, Lehane, one of the great American fiction writers. The tale starts in 1920s Boston, during the Prohibition years and sweeps majestically through to the eve of WW2. Joe Coughlin, a 19-year-old small-time stick-up crook, foolishly robs the casino of a big-time gangster. During the heist he becomes intrigued by one of the workers, the sassy, fearless Emma Gould. He tracks her down afterwards and falls desperately in love. But Emma is also the moll of the gangster whose casino Coughlin robbed, setting off a blood-splattered train of events that culminate in Coughlin becoming one of America’s most feared gangsters. – William Saunderson-Meyer @TheJaundicedEye

The Mermaid’s Daughter
Ann Claycomb (HarperCollins)
Book fling
****
This is the modernised version of The Little Mermaid – not the happy singing Disney version but the edgy Hans Christian Andersen telling. Kathleen is a young student and soprano opera singer. Her feet hurt like hell – like she is walking on broken glass all time – and her mouth pains with her tongue feeling like an alien part of her body. The fates decree that her life is a tragedy of murder. It’s an easy read and seems to be suited for younger readers but the story has a great hook and one learns quite a bit of the workings of an opera. – Jennifer Platt @Jenniferdplatt

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• Right Behind You by Lisa Gardner
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• This is How it Always is by Laurie Frankel
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• The Mermaid’s Daughter by Ann Claycomb
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Published in the Sunday Times

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
Arundhati Roy (Hamish Hamilton)

Two decades after her debut novel won the Man Booker prize, Arundhati Roy has finally published a second. But she certainly hasn’t been idle, as Michele Magwood discovered in this exclusive interview for Lifestyle
 
 
You need to stay with this book. It is dazzling, but puzzling, gutting but ultimately uplifting, farcical at times, unimaginably cruel at others. It is both real and hallucinatory. But then, this is Arundhati Roy after all, and what would we expect? It has been 20 years since Roy published The God of Small Things, her debut novel about a pair of twins born in the south-west city of Kerala in India. It was an immediate success, one of those storeyed books that break through from nowhere, a success that publishers are always trying – and failing – to replicate. It won the Man Booker prize and racked up impressive sales – Roy still lives on the royalties, although she gives much of the money to her favourite causes. On the one hand The God of Small Things is an intimate family saga; on the other it is an intensely political story, sharply critical of the caste system.

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness jostles politics to the front of the stage: the occupation of the Kashmir Valley, Hindu nationalism, the massacre in Gujarat of Muslims in 2002.

On the telephone from London, Roy is softly spoken and quietly furious. “India manages to pass itself off as this cuddly democracy but if you really look at it… do you know there hasn’t been a day since 1947 when it became independent, that the army hasn’t been actively deployed within the borders of India against its so-called own people? Not a day! Whether it’s been in Assam, Punjab, Hyderabad, Kashmir, the number of people who have been killed or maimed or tortured, it’s just flown under the radar while this narrative has been confected.”

Just after The God of Small Things was published, politics in India took a sinister turn; what Roy calls a right-wing Hindu-chauvinist government came to power. Within months it conducted a series of nuclear tests and the author launched into years of activism (see podcast).

While the new novel lays bare the violence of the Indian system, Roy is too clever a writer to make it a manifesto. Her imagination and descriptive powers lift it far above the polemical.

It opens in a graveyard in the Old City of Delhi where a middle-aged woman has made her home. She is Anjum, a Muslim transgender person. “She lived in the graveyard like a tree. At dawn she saw the crows off and welcomed the bats home. At dusk she did the opposite.”

Anjum is a “hijra”, the South Asian third sex that refers to hermaphrodites, eunuchs and transgender people. As a young man she leaves her home and joins a community of hijras called a “khwabgah” and embraces her femaleness. “In Urdu it means a house of dreams,” explains Roy. “The city is divided into zones and each hijra community has a zone. The way they used to earn money was to go to weddings or births, and they would be given money because they’re considered lucky.”

Anjum is exuberantly happy until she travels to Gujarat where she is caught up in the massacre of Muslims in 2002, escaping the butchery only because the soldiers believed it would be unlucky to kill her. “Something breaks in her after that and she becomes silent.”

She moves to the cemetery and gradually builds rooms around the graves. It becomes known as the Jannat Guest House, drawing the liminal people of the city to it.

“She’s the hub of all kinds of other people who don’t fit into the cast-iron social grid, the social mesh that Indian society is forced into,” Roy says. “It’s a book about borders. Obviously the incendiary border of gender; there are dalits, or untouchables, who convert to Islam, a porous border between human beings and animals, and between the living and the dead in the graveyard. And Ü then there’s Tilo, with the border of caste running through her.”

Tilo is the other main character of the novel, around whom an intense love story swirls. Three men, friends from university days, are in love with her. “She gave the impression that she had somehow slipped off her leash,” observes a friend. “As though she was taking herself for a walk while the rest of us were being walked — like pets.”

Through one of the men Tilo gets caught up in the protracted, violent struggle for independence in Kashmir.

“You can only tell the truth about Kashmir in fiction,” says Roy. “The disappeared, the unmarked graves. How the air gets seeded with terror. You can’t tell it through human rights reports.”

Roy waited this long to write another novel because, “I wouldn’t write another one until I was sure there was something complex to say. I’m not in that thing of producing a book every year. If I hadn’t written another it would have been fine with me. But I had something that would not remain unwritten.”

Still, it was 10 years in the writing.

“Suddenly I started getting colonised by these people, and then obsessed. Your mind is always working and the layers are building up and then there was a period when it was almost like breaking stone. How do you go about building this city? In the last couple of years it’s just insanity because you’re up all day and all night, you’re worried about your house burning down. Writing is a combination of discipline and madness.”

The phrase “magical realism” is often attached to Roy’s work, but The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is more Indian surrealism.

She laughs softly. “Yes, you in South Africa would understand that better than Western readers. This kind of realism is probably magical for them, but it’s not magical, it’s just how it is.”

When her characters started talking to her, insisting that she write their story, “I thought how do you break out of this increasingly domesticated form, this easily catalogue-able, easily marketable form of fiction writing that is almost frightened of taking on the big themes?”

And so here it is: baggy, patched, phantasmagorical. A story that spreads out from a bloodied lake in Kashmir to a bloodied house in suburban California, from a gaudy boudoir in Old Delhi to a severe hospital in Kerala. A story of strange, watchful animals and abject souls, of foundling babies and spirits, revenge and redemption, bravery and venality.

“I know the book is complicated, it’s a bit like navigating a city,” she says. “But there’s no sort of easily digestible, neat little thematic way I wanted to write.”

EXTRACT:

Around her the city sprawled for miles. Thousand-year-old sorceress, dozing, but not asleep, even at this hour. Grey flyovers snaked out of her Medusa skull, tangling and untangling under the yellow sodium haze. Sleeping bodies of homeless people lined their high, narrow pavements, head to toe, head to toe, looping into the distance. Old secrets were folded into the furrows of her loose, parchment skin. Each wrinkle was a street, each street a carnival. Each arthritic joint a crumbling amphitheatre where stories of love and madness, stupidity, delight and unspeakable cruelty had been played out for centuries. But this was to be the dawn of her resurrection. Her new masters wanted to hide her knobby, varicose veins under imported fishnet stockings, cram her withered tits into saucy padded bras and jam her aching feet into pointed high-heel shoes. They wanted her to swing her stiff old hips and re-route the edges of her grimace upwards into a frozen, empty smile. It was the summer Grandma became a whore.

Listen to the podcast of their interview here.
 

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• The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundathi Roy
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Published in the Sunday Times

The Fall of the House of Wilde
Emer O’Sullivan (Bloomsbury)
Book real
****
This biography on one of the 19th century’s most prolific playwright’s family history is an engaging account of a generation’s demise. O’Sullivan covers the Wilde genealogy from 1758 – the year in which Oscar Wilde’s physician father, William, was commemorated with a plaque for his contribution to medicine, archaeology and folkore. We’re also introduced to his brother Willie, and his mother, Jane. O’Sullivan’s account of William’s sexual assault charges, Jane’s anguish following the charges, and the family’s fall into ill-repute is an engrossing, empathetic and eloquent read. The book brims with dates, names, letters and photos, and a comprehensive introduction to Irish history, yet O’Sullivan’s prose never reads as a dull textbook. – Mila de Villiers @mila_se_kind

Marlena
Julie Buntin (Picador)
Book buff
****
“Tell me what you can’t forget, and I’ll tell you who you are” – so begins a tale of teenage friendship and addiction. Cat looks back on her year in Michigan, where as a girl of 15 she meets glamorous and wild Marlena. The story contains echoes of Carolyn Forche’s poem As Children Together and Beatrice Sparks’ Go Ask Alice. But Buntin brings a fresh take on rural America, land of isolation and Trump supporters. This is where prescription drugs and meth have infiltrated the crumbling remains of the white working class. Lonely and floundering, the teens hold each other up and drag each other down. Some, like Cat, do grow up and escape, but the scars and memories will follow them wherever they go. – Tiah Beautement @ms_tiahmarie

The Roanoke Girls
Amy Engel, Hodder & Stoughton
Book fling
***
After her mother committed suicide when she was 15 years old, Lane Roanoke went to live with her grandparents and cousin Allegra. More than a decade later, and somewhat lost in Los Angeles, Lane gets a call from her grandfather to say Allegra has gone missing. Lane returns to her grandparents but now must face the dark secret that made her leave so many years ago. This novel will have you read until the very end in just one sitting. – Jessica Levitt @jesslevitt
 
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• Marlena by Julie Buntin
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• The Roanoke Girl by Amy Engel
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Published in The Sunday Times

What is the strangest thing you’ve done when researching a book?

I went for brunch to Norma’s at the Le Parker Meridien Hotel in New York City. It’s the place to have brunch. They’re famous for their $1000 omelette, which I can assure you I didn’t order!

What do you snack on while you write?

Cups of tea and gingernut biscuits.
 
 
Where do you write best?

I have a holiday home in county Wicklow (known as the Garden of Ireland). My veranda overlooks a 32-acre field. The farmer thinks it’s his field but we call it “ours”. I watch the wheat ripen from green to gold and gaze in awe at the Red Kites flying overhead, and write for hours in this lovely paradise.

What is the last thing you read that made you laugh out loud?

Ciara Geraghty’s novel This is Now.

Who’d you like to be stuck in a lift with?

Graham Norton.

How would you earn your living if you had to give up writing?

I’d love to be a set designer in the theatre.

What was the first novel you read?

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott.

Who is your favourite fictional hero?

Samwise Gamgee, Hobbit of the Shire, in The Lord of the Rings.

Which current book will you remember in 10 years?

Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

Which words do you most overuse?

It differs with every novel. In Orange Blossom Days it was “cascading” and “furious”.

What are you working on next?

My next novel is called The Four Winds and will be set in Ireland and France. I’m also collaborating with three other authors on a special non-fiction book called Death: The Next Great Adventure.

What books are you embarrassed not to have read yet?

Most of the Booker Prize winners!

Patricia Scanlan’s latest novel is Orange Blossom Days, Simon & Schuster, R305

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• Orange Blossom Days by Patricia Scanlan
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Published in the Sunday Times

The Sunday Times editor, Mr Bongani Siqoko, tells me “illumination of truthfulness” is the main criterion of the Alan Paton Award, which was established in 1989 for non-fiction works. He believes it applies to fiction as well, and quotes Albert Camus, “Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.”

I thank him for inviting me to give this talk. I think the topic is quite apt in this age of truthiness (1), post-truth (2) and alternative facts (3).

I must begin by saluting the Sunday Times for establishing these awards and for maintaining them for so many years. I am honored that I was the first writer to win the inaugural Sunday Times Fiction Prize with my third novel, The Heart of Redness, some 16 years ago.

I must also salute the Sunday Times for its sterling work in journalism, particularly its investigative reporting. You, and your colleagues have added value to our young democracy by taking your watchdog role seriously. Democracy cannot function without freedom of expression in general and of the media in particular.

Some of you might know of Lorraine Adams, who first caused literary waves with her debut novel, Harbor. She wrote this work of fiction after spending years reporting on Afghanistan and Iran for the Washington Post and winning a Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism. In her journalism, she is reputed to have dug out hidden stories on crucial issues such as xenophobia, immigration and terrorism. It was therefore a major surprise when she decided to quit the profession. There was even greater astonishment when she revealed she was leaving journalism for fiction so that she could write the truth. She explained that it was only with fiction that she could address the truth behind the facts. Whereas the journalist views truth in terms of witnessable and observable scenes, she added, the novelist pierces into a privacy where the truth resides.

She is correct. Journalism answers the simple question: what happened? It is the same question that is answered by most forms of non-fiction, including history. What happened? Of course, there are attendant questions such as how and why it happened, but the key story lies in the event.

Fiction on the other hand goes much further, and answers the question: what was it really like to be in what happened?

Talking of the genesis of her fine book on a bitter rivalry of two women who are neighbors, The Woman Next Door, Yewande Omotoso tells an NPR interviewer, “I was really looking at what is it like, particularly for the Marion character, to have been someone during the apartheid days who didn’t necessarily resist apartheid, disagree with it, but kind of went along. What is it like now, you know, post-apartheid.” [emphasis mine]

What is it like? I am sure it is the same question that Kopano Matlwa attempts to answer with her suspenseful prose as we follow the young doctor, Masechaba, trying to reclaim her life in Period Pain, or Bronwyn Law-Viljoen’s The Printmaker as we search for an answer to the enigma of the printmaker’s solitary life. What was it like to be Hennie, an Afrikaner teenager in the Orange Free State of the 1980s, who has to escape his abusive father, and embark on a remarkable journey in search of his sister? We experience Hennie’s life with him in Mark Winkler’s The Safest Place You Know.

What was it like to be in what happened? It is a question whose answer gives us a sensory experience of the event. Fiction is experiential because it is transportational and vice versa.

To address this transporting question the writers create fully-realized characters – protagonists and antagonists and their allies – struggling to achieve their objectives and overcome obstacles in a compelling narrative arc. These characters may be based on real-life people the writer has known, or may be composites of same. They may even claim to have emerged from imagination. But we remember that the line of demarcation between imagination and memory is very blurred. We imagine from what we know; in other words, what we remember. Memory itself is essentially fictive. And since we are what we remember, our work creates us as we create it.

Into whatever we create as artists we bring the baggage that is our own biographies, whether we are conscious of that or not. A lot of what we create in a character is drawn from us, the creators, and from our experiences. We are always writing ourselves in the same way that we are always writing the same book.

The important thing about conventional fictional characters is that they do not function in any credible manner until their actions are motivated. The few exceptions that defy this convention are such postmodern narrative modes as magical realism. In traditional fiction, there is a practical “why” behind a character’s objectives and behaviors. Her actions are not only motivated but justified as well. This means she is who she is because of her life-experience, of her history. Fiction is very big on causality. Her actions are therefore psychologically (not necessarily morally) justified. This tells you that every writer of fiction worth her salt is a psychologist, a keen observer of human behavior and mental processes.

It is small wonder, therefore, that Sigmund Freud drew most of his groundbreaking conclusions – resulting in psychotherapy, “the talking cure” – from studying characters in novels rather than from analyzing live subjects. A whole new branch of psychiatry known as psychoanalysis was founded by analyzing fiction.

In the academy these days fiction is used to teach many other subjects, not only in psychology, history and philosophy, because fiction pierces into the truth behind the facts. Sipho Noko, an LL.B. student, told me on Twitter the other day that he had never read an African novel before until my novel, Black Diamond, was prescribed at the University of Pretoria Law School for a topic titled “Law from Below”. When I wrote that novel – a layman in the field of law – I never imagined it could be a law school textbook. Another lawyer, Advocate Maru Moremogolo, wrote to me about Little Suns, “Your book brings context to judicial powers of traditional leaders, a perfect timing #Dalindyebo – how the King wanted some of his judicial powers returned from the magistrate.”

He thought I was being prophetic, I thought I was just telling a story.

I was once astounded when I learned that Ways of Dying was prescribed at an architecture school in the United Kingdom. When I wrote that novel I never imagined I was writing about architecture. Yewande Omotoso, who is an architect in another life, once tried to explain how the novel relates to architecture, a field I know nothing about. But I forget now what she said.

The ability of fiction to operate so comfortably across all these diverse disciplines lies not only in its descriptive powers or its capacity to delineate structural problems, but in its facility to examine interiorities. The interior experience is absent in journalism, as it is in most non-fiction. The search of the interior experience has resulted in the emergence of Narrative Journalism in recent times (and of New Journalism in the last century), where the practitioners try to apply the techniques of fiction such as point of view and plot and various other narrative devices to journalism. You have seen this practiced quite successfully in the New Yorker and to some extent in Granta.

One notable non-fiction genre that has mastered the intricacies of hybridity is memoir. Memoir, unlike biography/autobiography, uses the tools of fiction to capture the essence of an aspect of the author’s life. Like fiction it explores interiorities.

The publishing industry in the Western world has set distinguishing features between memoir and traditional autobiography to which it adheres faithfully. Of course, writers always experiment and transgress genres. An autobiography is about the writer. She is the subject in a historical chronicle of her life and the events that shaped it – from the time she was born to a determined period. A memoir, on the other hand, is not about the writer but about something else as experienced by the writer or those close to her. A memoir therefore must have a subject because the writer is not the subject. For instance, the subject may be Alzheimer. A memoir must have a central theme: for example, on the author’s struggles to cope with a husband who is gradually losing his memory. A true memoirist works from memory – hence the name of the genre – because she is not a chronicler of history. She mines her memory and tries to capture the feelings and emotions she had at the time of the event. Her account is enriched by the distortions of time, by obliviousness, by faulty recall, by amnesia. The fidelity is to the emotion rather than to historical accuracy. That is why you can conflate characters in a memoir and re-invent new contexts etc. to capture and represent to the reader the feeling and sometimes the philosophy. The emphasis is on emotional truth.

History, like journalism, answers the question: what happened? We write historical fiction to take history to the level of: what was it like to be in what happened? The story of Mhlontlo that I write in Little Suns was well-known to me from the time I was a toddler. It is part of family lore. Even after I had researched its historical aspects, it still remained a series of anecdotes – surface stories lacking subtlety. It was only when I was writing it as a work of fiction, exploring what it was really like to be Mhlontlo by recreating his exterior and interior worlds, and the worlds of those who surrounded him, protagonists and antagonists, their loves, their losses, their gains, victories and defeats, that the emotional import hit me. Anger swelled in my chest. To my embarrassment I was caught screaming one day, “Damn, this is what they did to my great grandfather.”

The injustices done to amaMpondomise by the British endure to this day under the ANC regime. The amaMpondomise continue to be punished for having stood against British colonialism.
Like most writers of historical novels, I write historical fiction to grapple with the present. Great historical fiction is more about the present than it is about the past. That is why the lawyer could relate the past I was re-imagining to present contestations. The past is always a strong presence in our present.

Traditional historians believe that history is objective reality. For me history does not have an objective existence. It exists only as an absence. We don’t have direct access to the past; we cannot scientifically and objectively observe its facts. We experience history through words, through storytelling and through chronicles of events and dates. Therefore, history is textual; our attempts at separating it from literature are tenuous.

History is as subjective as journalism. I know, you think you’re objective. Observe how The New Age on one hand and the Sunday Times on the other report on the same event. It is bound to read like two different events. The value-laden words, the incidents selected or left out, and the angles that the reporters take will surely reflect their subjectivities. If contemporary journalism cannot be objective about contemporary events, what more of history which is shaped by its necessary textuality?

History is the story of the victor. That is what I try to correct. In doing so I make it herstory as well. South Africa presents us with a good example of the creation and imposition of a narrative that legitimizes the ruling elite of the day. The colonizers wrote history from their own perspective, always to validate their privileged position. The subaltern groups were denied a voice. They were even erased from the landscape so that when the colonizer arrived in southern Africa the lands were vast and empty and the natives non-existent. The colonialist dismissed as fanciful oral traditions that located ancient kingdoms and empires in the region dating hundreds of years before colonization. When the colonizer’s own ethno-archeologists excavated towns and settlements dating more than a thousand years ago, the proponents of “vast empty lands” created alternative narratives attributing them to alien civilizations – sometimes even from outer space. They were the victors and could therefore re-create the past in their own image.

Now a new order exists in South Africa. Like all regimes before it the new dispensation is narrating the past from its own perspective, re-creating and reshaping it to palliate the very present it continues to mismanage, erasing the contribution of some from the annals of history, and lionizing the current crooks – the harvesters of matundu ya uhuru, the fruits of freedom.

The truth of fiction can give context to and shed new insights on the stories unearthed by your investigative reporting. It gives them longevity and digestibility. Fiction is even more essential in this age when shamelessness and impunity among the ruling elite, and corruption-fatigue in the populace, are leading South Africa to perdition.

1 – Truthiness: The quality of seeming or being felt to be true, even if not necessarily true.
2 – Post-truth politics (also called post-factual politics): a political culture in which debate is framed largely by appeals to emotion disconnected from the details of policy, and by the repeated assertion of talking points to which factual rebuttals are ignored. (Wikipedia)
3 – Alternative facts: President Trump Counselor Kellyanne Conway’s phrase to describe demonstrable falsehoods that are touted as truth.

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• The Heart of Redness by Zakes Mda
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• The Woman Next Door by Yewande Omotoso
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• Period Pain by Kopano Matlwa
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• The Printmaker by Bronwyn Law-Viljoen
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• The Safest Place You Know by Mark Winkler
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• Black Diamond by Zakes Mda
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• Little Suns by Zakes Mda
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• Ways of Dying by Zakes Mda
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