Category: Books

Dusty casefiles, potholes of blank nurtured to life

Du Plessis does more than observe the individual through the eyes and words of medical professionals with a Victorian mindset. He gazes at the crumbs left by reports and throwaway descriptions – all that remains of these individuals, who were invisible because they danced to a tune different from everyone else.

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.

Gut punches and belly laughs

Taking you unflinchingly to the bedside of his elderly mother, flailing with dementia but sometimes starkly spot on in her lucidity, Peter Godwin’s memoir, ‘Exit Wounds’ laced with alliteration vigorously contemplates the complex texture of the life of a Zimbabwean-born war correspondent, with British ties who currently calls America home.