The Trigger: Hunting the Assassin who Brought the World to War
Tim Butcher (Chatto & Windus)
***** (five stars)
Book buff
It’s convenient but lazy to place Gavrilo Princip, the assassin of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, at the pivot of World War 1 and the bloodbaths that followed. Butcher, reporter on the ’90s turmoil in Bosnia and now resident in Cape Town, makes a study of the man that history views as a ragged, nationalistic upstart. He traces his steps from the Bosnian back of beyond to Sarajevo, interviewing latter-day relatives and always triangulating the turbulent history of the region with aplomb.
- Derek Abdinor @DerekAbdinor
The Visionist
Rachel Urquhart (Simon & Schuster)
****
Book buff
A book built on lies and reversals, told in the three linked voices of Sister Charity, an orphan in a Shaker community, Polly Kimball, a damaged teenager who has escaped her father and is the titular Visionist, and Simon Pryor, assigned to investigate the mysterious fire on the Kimball’s farm. The writing is elegant and clean and characters are deftly stitched. However, Polly’s mother is the uneven seam in an otherwise clever book on the power women hold: she is a victim, and makes her family into victims. It seems tonally dishonest that ultimately it is the actions of men that save her.
- Cat Hellison @hellioncat
Adults Only
Edited by Joanne Hichens (Mercury, R190)
****
Book fling
There’s something weirdly comforting and delightful about these erotic shorts. Maybe it’s the fact that they are quintessentially South African. In Alex Smith’s story, The Big Toad, you have your Snowflake flour, Ouma rusks and Skip washing powder as props in an unexpected orgy. Turning, Nick Mulgrew’s winning tale of varsity sexual politics, is set in Grahamstown where a breakup happens at the infamous bar, The Rat. Plenty of genres are explored – from magic realism to horror – and the stories are more than just titillating, they celebrate our many differences as well as our fetishes.
- Jennifer Platt @Jenniferdplatt
Book details
- The Trigger: Hunting the Assassin Who Brought the World to War by Tim Butcher
EAN: 9780802123251
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- The Visionist by Rachel Urquhart
EAN: 9781471113338
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- Adults Only: Stories of love, lust, sex and sexuality edited by Joanne Hichens
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EAN: 9781928230007
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