Category: Books

Treasured mine-dump dust memories

ZANE MEAS ADORES everything about South African writer Chris van Wyk. It’s about the cunning and oft self-deprecating magic of being Coloured in a world that doesn’t consider you black enough or white enough. It’s about the chalky memories of racism and the mixed up words and opaque […]

Dogs of war

A SKOP, SKIET en donder novel with a conservation twist, Tony Park’s freshly published Scent of Fear is a real page turner. But it takes a special kind of skill to write in the first person, as a dog. Convincingly. And Australian journalist-turned-novelist Park achieves all of this and […]

To the person who made me into a god

ANY MANIFESTATION OF the arts in the public domain involves collaborative energy, give and take, the use of others’ expertise. And the names of those people are mostly not on the headlines of the work. Ask any sub-editor, stage manager, gallery factotum or set designer. Björn Runge’s film […]

Take me to this river

DON’T BE MISLED into thinking that the relative size of sociologist Jacklyn Cock’s latest book is indicative of its value. Clocking in at less than 200 pages, this supremely lucid text is immense and it will take you the length and depth and width of the Kowie River […]

Potato Peel Pie, anyone?

WAR. IT’S A time of cruelty and violence, of value-shifting upheaval and horrible surprises. War history, by its very nature is clustered with rich and timeless stories of hope and love. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is a film based on the eponymous novel, that […]