WHEN YOU REACH the kind of moment in your life where you can look back on the former you, with all her values and dramas, with great fondness, it’s always nice to have someone who knew that version of you at the time by your side. Myra Egdes, at 89, has written a debut novel which touches on aspects of her past, with a lot of wit, a slice of slang and some fabulous adventures. This is The Goldfish Bowl and Other Tales, which Egdes has self-published.

Cast in the kind of writing style you may recognise in the work of 20^th century Mexican writer, Manuel Puig – he of the Kiss of the Spiderwoman – The Goldfish Bowl and Other Tales has no outside voice. The stories are premised on emails between Mia and Jessica who knew each other back in the day, at high school and during the rich couple of years of single adulthood, between school and grown-up life, in the 1950s.

The letters between Mia and Jessica take you on hilarious forays into the kinds of adventures the girls undertook (and some they never signed up for), in backpacking around Europe with their heads wide open for adventure and their hearts vulnerable to every good-looking boy they discovered glancing in their direction.

It’s a kind of ‘sowing of wild oats’ series of moments for young women of the time, but in being so, offers a slice of life that comments on apartheid values and the sense of protection that was implicit to young white travellers from South Africa. It’s a book that might make you think of terrifying tales like that extrapolated in the recent Netflix series, The Serpent, about notorious killer Charles Sobhraj, who prayed on young hippies with stars in their eyes and travellers’ cheques in their wallets but Mia and Jessica lived to tell the tale and then some.

There is a chapter that concludes the work with a bit of ‘skop, skiet en donder’, which feels a little out of character, but works its way into a narrative that enables both women to have something to tell their great grandchildren. It’s a lovely book: a quick and light read with a sense of humanity wrapped in all its fibres.

• The Goldfish Bowl and Other Tales is written by Myra Egdes (2025) and is available here: egdesmyra@gmail.com