Shorlisted for the Sunday Times Literary Awards 2022 Non-Fiction Prize‘There are moments in life that are pure, and which seem to hang in the air, unhitched from the everyday world as we know it. Suspended for a few seconds, they float in their own space and time with their own hidden prospects. For want of a better term, we call these moments “magical” and when we remember them they are cloaked in a halo of special meaning.’For 14-year-old Johnny ...

An Afrikaner crime reporter returns home to face the evil and complex legacy of South African apartheid in " a witness-bearing act of the rarest courage" (Michael Kerr).Rian Malan's classic work of reportage, My Traitor's Heart is at once beautiful, horrifying, and profound in ways that earned him comparisons to Michael Herr and Ryszard Kapuściński, and inspired the London Times to call him "South Africa's Hunter S. Thompson." An ...

A sharply observed new novel about post-apartheid South Africa from the Nobel Prize winnerNadine Gordimer is one of our most telling contemporary writers. With each new work, she attacks—with a clear-eyed fierceness, a lack of sentimentality, and a deep understanding of the darkest depths of the human soul—her eternal themes: the inextricable link between personal and communal history; the inescapable moral ambiguities of daily life; the political and racial tension...

**National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist • In the House of the Interpreter hauntingly describes the formative experiences of a young man who would become a world-class writer and, as a political dissident, a moral compass to us all“Brilliant and essential. . . . A work of understated and heartfelt prose that relates one man’s intimate view of the epic cultural and political shifts that created modern Africa.” —Los Angeles Times**Renowned novelist, poe...

Kasinomi is a book as eclectic, mysterious and colourful as the places and people it explores. eKasi, the lokasie, the South African township, once an apartheid ghetto, is today an amazingly transformed place. This township today is an eclectic mix of mansions, shacks, spaza shops, rocking taverns, hawkers, taxis and hot wheels. In this kasi there are vibrant businesses, energetic people, a tightly networked social community and abundant hope. That is not to say there isn't extreme poverty...

Identity, belonging and voyages of personal discovery are but some of the themes inventively explored in Antjie Krog’s first full-length work to appear in English since the publication of Country of My Skull. In times of fundamental change, people tend to find a space, lose it and then find another space as life and the world transform around them. What does this metamorphosis entail and in what ways are we affected by it? How do we live through it and what may we become on our journey tow...

They have names like Barmy Bernie, Daft Donald, and Steamin' Sammy. They like lager (in huge quantities), the Queen, football clubs (especially Manchester United), and themselves. Their dislike encompasses the rest of the known universe, and England's soccer thugs express it in ways that range from mere vandalism to riots that terrorize entire cities. Now Bill Buford, editor of the prestigious journal Granta, enters this alternate society and records both its savageries and its sinister al...

Middleburg is a coming of age memoir recollecting the authors childhood experiences of growing up in a small town in apartheid South Africa. M. J. Poynter provides a scathing attack of the apartheid regime as seen from the perspective of an English immigrant who finds himself growing up in a culture of conflicting values. The novel breaks new ground in terms of providing an examination of oppression from the perspective of a white minority. Here the instruments of apartheid are viewed from...

MY FIRST COUP D'ETAT is a literary nonfiction account that charts the coming of age of John Dramani Mahama in Ghana during the dismal post-independence "lost decades" of Africa. He was seven years old when rumors of that first coup reached his boarding school in Accra. His father was suddenly missing. "It is sometimes incorrectly referred to in texts as a bloodless coup, yet it was anything but," Mahama writes. "They tried, as best they could, with smiles and toffee, to shield me from thei...

Researched and written by two historians well respected in concentric circles, this hilarious take on our collective past reveals stunning new discoveries and fascinating new figures, from Koos van Doosch, the cheese pimp who settled the Cape a year before Van Riebeeck, to Shaka’s lesser-known brother, Nigel Zulu, who just wanted to be a florist.You’ll discover how the winner of the Mr Mielie Board beauty pageant came to rule South Africa, and you’ll celebrate our greatest triumphs...

Sedick Isaacs was a prisoner of conscience on Robben Island where Nelson Mandela spent m18 years. This is another perspective of another section of the prison through the eyes of a scientist.

South from Limpopo is a social, cultural and political journey through South Africa, before, during and after the transfer of power in 1994, by the much-loved and formidable travel writer, Dervla Murphy. It is an account of three journeys, covering more than 6000 miles by bicycle, which took Murphy through all nine provinces of the new South Africa. She talked to people of all colours and political persuasions from wealthy and fearful whites, to impoverished, rural Boers and black farm lab...