In ‘Bush Brothers’, premised on de Witt’s experiences in the Angolan war, reflected on by war historians as South Africa’s ‘Vietnam’ in terms of the damage it wrought and its purposelessness, you get to understand the horror of violent sudden loss, the impact of friendship and terror of the unknown.
‘Kite Flying at World’s End’ is a beautiful, lucid read, edited to be tight and brief in its splaying out of the whole universe rolled into a few weeks. It leaves you with your heart holding onto the things that matter and a respect for how things must turn out.
Van Graan’s wit ranges from political one-liners that make you hear the proverbial “Ba Dum Tss” at the punch line in your mind’s ear, to brilliant sketches that reverberate with smart puns and rude twists of linguistic fate, not to mention the tweaking of popular songs into oft political weapons.
SHE’S TOUGH. SHE’S wise. She has everything it takes to be conversant and earn respect in the uncouth macho South African man’s world that constituted the SA Police Service in the mid-1990s. She also has what it takes to skip the light fantastic to leap into the abyss […]
LET’S FACE IT: we all need a beautiful page turner, that sets us on fire and gives us something potent to come home to. This is Craig Higginson’s 2023 novel, The Ghost of Sam Webster. And yes, it’s a thriller, but there’s depth to it which is about […]
WHAT DO YOU need to be able to take your life, warts and all, and explain it from its awkward bullied beginning until today, to a total stranger in a way which makes them laugh and cry and get something out of it? A combination of self-love and […]
TAKE THE GENRE of the South African farm novel, throw it in the air with all its idiosyncrasies and hypocrisies, violence and violation, broken promises and trashed dreams, and a great contemporary South African classic is born. Take the work on stage, and a different kind of magic […]
SHE STANDS WITH the kind of poise that catches you in the throat, and once you’ve made contact with her eye, you cannot move on without feeling that something within you has changed. Is it in the sheer beauty of her coat, speckled by God himself? Or is […]
A BUILT-UP PLACE is so much more than a dot on a map. It’s a repository of history and emotions, of architecture and lives. But how do you catch its essence: the stuff of which it is made, today and yesterday? How to you portray the energy that […]
GLOWING, YET UNDERSTATED magic comes of a particular kind of candid, descriptive writing that doesn’t stoop to sensationalism or bald self-promotion. You can find this in George Orwell’s domestic diaries, but you can also find it in Adam Riley’s Birds of South Africa. This current publication offers an […]
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