Category: Book

How to do Bonteheuwel proud

Anwar McKay’s beautiful book ‘The Invisible Boy from Bramble Way’ is about coming out queer in a religious Muslim world coloured by Calvinist values, apartheid relics and bias. It is about learning to call the world – the ‘rich’ parts of the world — home, because you can. Because you’ve earned it.

Sex, lies and the State Theatre

Terry’s writing is replete with beauty and malice. It’s juicy with sex and sodden with Schadenfreude and self-flagellation. As a novelist, Terry has the temerity to turn his focus on things that you rarely find dealt with as side issues in novels, from late-middle aged carnal joy to colostomy bags.

Sword masters; rhino bounty

The story paints a hopscotch series of leaps between 1880 and the present, in the light of rhino poaching, trophy hunting, illegal aliens and other such crimes, often leaving you on one cliff’s edge as a chapter ends, and finding you on another, 100 years later, as the next begins.

Here be dragons

While LaFarge’s immersive book ‘Sting in the Tale’ (Doppelhouse Press 2021) doesn’t pretend to be comprehensive; it splits the fabric of what truth means when you are making art and allows this idea to stretch wide. Wider than you can believe. It challenges the values of education and truth. Scrumptiously.

She did it her way!

Prowse’s career was remarkable. She canoodled with the biggest names in the biz, but she gave blood, sweat and tears to her craft in hefty doses and her niece does her proud in not oohing and aahing with platitudes, but in giving an exceptional life feasibility without rendering Prowse godlike.

Just me and my black dog

Onstage, it is just Ingrid and her words, her wine, her complex articulation of love and her brutal experience of despair. The letters are unabashed in their eroticism and give-and-take, but Jonker’s aloneness is candidly central. This theatre-making gesture makes you consider the loneliness of being in the world, altogether.