Voted one of the hundred most important books published in Africa during the last century. Winner of the WA Hofmeyr Prize, the CNA Literary Award and the Louis Luyt Prize.Sharing the language and religion or the Afrikaners bent on her people's subjugation, Poppie Nongena - a Xhosa woman born in an Upington township - has no choice but to negotiate the riptide of structural violence that is apartheid South Africa. Rootless, her ailing husband emasculated by legislation and her children bear...

Poppie Nongena's arduous journey covers 40 years of South Africa's history, sweeping through the riots of Sharpeville, Soweto and Cape Town, on to an indefinite but unpromising future. The plot reflects the brutality and injustice of the Apartheid system, while Elsa Joubert's characterisations reflects the courage and fortitude of people in the face of hardship and difficulty.Poppie's contented childhood in the Cape's countryside came to an end when she married a migrant worker, an...

At a prayer meeting on a cold Rotterdam night, the young clerk Aart Anthonij van der Lingen - a pale, sickly, hunchbacked 'fish from the North' - is held in the charismatic Reverend Johannes Kicherer's thrall. Lured by Kicherer's passion, he leaves his grey and loveless life to land at the Cape of Good Hope as a lay missionary in 1800. But when the Missionary Society draws lots to determine where to send the new arrivals, Van der Lingen is sent east and Kicherer north. The hunchback missio...

Celebrated author Elsa Joubert has been a traveller to foreign places all her life. With this memoir, completed in her 95th year, she explores the continent of old age. It is a searing, honest account of ageing, as she settles into a cosmopolitan Cape Town retirement home along with the Englishman across the passage, her Dutch friend Jo Struik, and the support of StomJapie. It also tells of the force of returning memories; of her sister's early death, rivalry with her brother, family holid...