Searing the South African political and Jewish landscape with a glance that takes in everything from the bizarre realities of farming culture and land reclamation to the philosophy of the kibbutz and where it is flawed, Marilyn Cohen De Villiers’s second blockbuster novel is a real page turner. […]
An elderly woman sits on the floor separating small stones from lentils. There’s an irrevocable sense of lyricism in her pose, her focus, which makes this mundane activity one of solemn importance. This photograph by Ranjith Kally of his mother, Rajwanthia Kally, taken in 1947, is a starting […]
It’s not every day that you come across a life story as shattering and empowering as that of classical ballerina Michaela DePrince. It’s also not every day that you encounter a first person narrative told with such unabashed freshness that leaves you with goosebumps on every page. On […]
Would you be interested in reading a blow by blow account of my sex life? How quickly would you lose interest? Writing about sexual encounters in the first person is dangerous: too much info and the words and their credibility part ways. And too much info about as […]
Writing is difficult. It’s a constant balancing act between spelling, grammar, content and structure. And then it’s about your reader, and your intentions: do you want to bamboozle them and chase them away with your assumptions of erudition, or do you want to seduce them into seeing your […]
From the outset this book shrieks its presence into your awareness. Oy vey my child is gay (and an addict) are the words emblazoned in shocking pink across the face of a beautiful toddler. From the first time you see this book, you might find it sensationalist and […]
The scourge of sexual violence behind closed doors in affluent, educated and God-fearing society might be considered a topic so well covered in contemporary times that it has become hackneyed. But Marilyn Cohen de Villiers has debuted with a most extraordinarily powerful novel that will not let you […]
A tale of the relentless complexity of sibling lives and how they can intertwine and contradict and hurt each other, under the devastating pall of apartheid, just before democracy, Five Lives at Noon is a real page turner. Meersman has created a bevy of characters which populate this […]
For first person narrative to sing with a poetry that pushes it away from petty personal accounts, separated by the phrase ‘and then’, you need to be a strong, experienced writer with an intimate understanding of the discipline and an ability to read your own work with scathing […]
Seldom does one come across a debut novel which sings so sublimely from each page that you don’t want it to end. Alice Simpson’s Ballroom is one such whirligig of a read, leaving you heady and happy and weepy, all at the same time. Modelled fairly conventionally, with […]
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