South Africa

Blood Hunter

An urban fantasy heavily influenced by real world history set in an alternative South African world steeped in South African myth.

I was on the verge of becoming a man…

But now I must be so much more.

Vampires took everything from me. My family, my village, and my path to adulthood. They have drained my land dry of blood and freedom. And now I want revenge.

I may not be a man in the eyes of my ancestors, but I follow a new path now.

To avenge my people, I will need to become so much more. I must forsake all that makes me weak. All that stands in the way of my purpose. Even if it means embracing a half-life.

I am Umzingeli wegazi. An outcast. A rogue. A killer. A Blood Hunter.

Note: Blood Hunter is an action-packed and thrilling urban fantasy novel set in the fantastical world of the Kat Drummond series (view on Amazon). Blood Hunter can be read as a standalone, before or after the Kat Drummond series though it’s better to read this before Kat’s book 10.

View on Amazon | Bookshop.org | SecondSale used book

Out of Bounds

Jane Addams Book Award
ALA Best Fiction for Young Adults
NY Public Library Books for the Teen Age
Parents' Choice Silver Honor

“We are the young people,
We will not be broken!
We demand freedom
And say
Away with slavery
In our land of Africa!"

For almost fifty years, apartheid forced the young people of South Africa to live apart as Blacks, Whites, Indians, and “Coloreds.” This unique and dramatic collection of stories—by native South African and Carnegie Medalist Beverley Naidoo—is about young people's choices in a beautiful country made ugly by injustice.

Each story is set in a different decade during the last half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, and features fictional characters caught up in very real events. Included is a Timeline Across Apartheid, which recounts some of the restrictive laws passed during this era, the events leading up to South Africa's first free democratic elections, and the establishment of a new “rainbow government” that leads the country today.

(A special thank you to book club member, Sarah Howe for the suggestion.)

View on Amazon | Bookshop.org (US) | SecondSale used book

The Expedition to the Baobab Tree

In J.M.Coetzee’s stunning translation: a powerfully symbolic story in the voice of a slave that explores the depths of imagination, isolation, fear, and love.

A slave woman is the only survivor of a failed expedition into the depths of Southern Africa. She shelters in the hollow trunk of a baobab tree where she relives her earlier existence in a state of increasing isolation. We are the sole witnesses to her moving history: her capture as a young child, her life in a harbor city on the eastern coast as servant to various masters, her journey with her last owner and protector, and her life in the baobab tree.

“Thanks to Stockenström’s rich language (wonderfully translated by award-winning novelist and Nobel Laureate J. M. Coetzee) and brilliant use of symbolism, The Expedition to the Baobab Tree is a heartbreaking story about what we stand to lose as humans, and about how what we stand to lose can never be returned.” —Three Percent

“Using image-rich and poetic language, the illiterate narrator vividly evokes enslavement, isolation, and longing.” —Publishers Weekly

(A special thank you to book club member, Elke Richelsen for the suggestion.)

View on Amazon | Bookshop.org (US) | SecondSale used book

Cry, the Beloved Country

“The greatest novel to emerge out of the tragedy of South Africa, and one of the best novels of our time.” —The New Republic

“A beautiful novel…its projection of character so immediate and full, its events so compelling, and its understanding so compassionate that to read the book is to share intimately, even to the point of catharsis, in the grave human experience.” —The NY Times

An Oprah Book Club selection, Cry, the Beloved Country, was an immediate worldwide bestseller when it was published in 1948. Alan Paton’s impassioned novel about a black man’s country under white man’s law is a work of searing beauty.

Cry, the Beloved Country, is the deeply moving story of the Zulu pastor Stephen Kumalo and his son, Absalom, set against the background of a land and a people riven by racial injustice. Remarkable for its lyricism, unforgettable for character and incident, Cry, the Beloved Country is a classic work of love and hope, courage and endurance, born of the dignity of man.

(A special thank you to book club member, Christine Jensen for the suggestion.)

View on Amazon | Bookshop.org (US) | SecondSale used book

The Steam Pig

A beautiful blonde has been killed by a bicycle spoke to the heart, Bantu gangster style. Why?

Set in Apartheid-era South Africa, The Steam Pig is the first in the outstanding mystery series featuring the biracial police team duo of Lieutenant Kramer and Detective Sergeant Mickey Zondi.

“James McClure's novel arrives like a slam in the kidneys . . . a gripping style, real characters, and an exotic locale. . . . The Steam Pig will not only keep the reader's nose to the page, it will also make [him] think.” —The NY Times Book Review

“This well-plotted, well-written murder mystery is exceptional ... sometimes grim, sometimes sourly comic, always shocking.” —The Atlantic

“That it takes place in the apartheid setting of South Africa, that it has a black and white police team so artfully conceived as to engender cheers, that it uses the power of subtlety over brash bias to make its points, sets it up as a memorable mystery.” —LA Times

“More than a good mystery story, which it is, The Steam Pig is also a revealing picture of the hate and sickness of apartheid society.” —The Washington Post

View on Amazon | Bookshop.org (US) | SecondSale used book

Disgrace

From the Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

At fifty-two, Professor David Lurie is divorced, filled with desire, but lacking in passion. When an affair with a student leaves him jobless, shunned by friends, and ridiculed by his ex-wife, he retreats to his daughter Lucy’s smallholding.

David’s visit becomes an extended stay as he attempts to find meaning in his one remaining relationship. Instead, an incident of unimaginable terror and violence forces father and daughter to confront their strained relationship and the equallity complicated racial complexities of the new South Africa. 

“Compulsively readable… A novel that not only works its spell but makes it impossible for us to lay it aside once we’ve finished reading it.” —The New Yorker

(A special thank you to book club member, Jennifer Koen for the suggestion.)

View on Amazon | Bookshop.org (US) | SecondSale used book

Zoo City

Multi-award winner including the Arthur C. Clarke Award & Publisher's Weekly Best of the Year Sci Fi & Fantasy among others

A unique cyberpunk/urban fantasy mash-up set in an alt Johannesburg where murderers and other criminals have magical animals mystically bonded to them for their crimes.

Zinzi has a Sloth on her back, a dirty 419 scam habit, and a talent for finding lost things. When a little old lady turns up dead and the cops confiscate her last paycheck, Zinzi’s forced to take on her least favorite kind of job—missing persons.

Being hired by reclusive music producer Odi Huron to find a teenybop pop star should be her ticket out of Zoo City, the festering slum where the criminal underclass and their animal companions live in the shadow of hell’s undertow. Instead, it catapults Zinzi deeper into the maw of a city twisted by crime and magic, where she’ll be forced to confront the dark secrets of former lives including her own.

“This book is a must read for lovers of South African fiction and urban fantasy alike. It is edgy and pacey. Like a rollercoaster ride, it sweeps you up, spins you around, turns you upside down and dumps you out on the other end, heady and breathless and yearning for more.” —Exclus1ves

"At times, the witty and lyrical prose is sheer magic, the story captivating and the characters exotic, cruel and beautiful while the backdrop of Johannesburg seethes with hidden, lurking dangers around every corner, Zoo City is quite simply captivating.” —SciFi & Fantasy Books

"Beukes’s future city is as spiky, distinctive and material a place as any cyberpunkopolis, and quit a bit fresher. The narrative is brisk and well turned, but the great achievement here is tonal: atmospheric, smart and memorable work.” —Locus

View on Amazon | Bookshop.org | SecondSale used book

An Instant in the Wind

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize

In early 1749, a white woman and a black man are stranded in the wilderness of the South African interior. She is an educated woman, totally helpless in the wilds. He is a runaway slave. They know only each other.

At first, their relationship is guarded, poisoned by the black and white in them both. But hesitantly, there emerges between them a fellowship that engulfs their most private selves, as they face the long trek back to civilisation.

This, then is the stunning story of their trek together, how they find in each other their mutual need and humanity, and finally how their days together turn into an unforgettable, tender love story.

“It is difficult to see how any South African novelist will be able to surpass the honesty of this novel or the real courage—both as artist and as a political man—which enabled Brink to write it.” —World Literature Today

(A special thank you to book club member, Jo Jackson for the suggestion.)

View on Amazon | Bookshop.org (US) | SecondSale used book

Burger's Daughter

The equidistant sea and sky were divided for her by the line of gravity like an hour-glass, through which a ship wrapped in pink-mauve haze passed from one element to the other, coming down over the horizon.

This is the moving story of the unforgettable Rosa Burger, a young woman from South Africa cast in the mold of a revolutionary tradition. Rosa tries to uphold her heritage handed on by martyred parents while still carving out a sense of self.

Although it is wholly of today, Burger's Daughter can be compared to those 19th century Russian classics that make a certain time and place come alive, and yet stand as universal celebrations of the human spirit.

Written by Nadine Gordimer, the winner of the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature.

(A special thank you to book club member, Beth Cummings for the suggestion.)

View on Amazon | Bookshop.org (US) | SecondSale used book

July's People

A startling, imaginative novel from the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

For years, it had been what is called a “deteriorating situation.” Now all over South Africa the cities are battlegrounds. The members of the Smales family—liberal whites—are rescued from the terror by their servant, July, who leads them to refuge in his village. What happens to the Smaleses and to July—the shifts in character and relationships—gives us an unforgettable look into the terrifying, tacit understandings and misunderstandings between blacks and whites.

“So flawlessly written that every one of its events seems chillingly, ominously possible.” —The NY Times Book Review

“Gordimer’s art has achieved and sustained a rare beauty. Her prose has a density and sparsity that one finds in the greatest writers. ”—The New Leader

(A special thank you to book club member, Carol Weldon for the suggestion.)

View on Amazon | Bookshop.org (US) | SecondSale used book

Country of My Skull

Ever since Nelson Mandela dramatically walked out of prison in 1990 after 27 years behind bars, South Africa has been undergoing a radical transformation. In one of the most miraculous events of the century, the oppressive system of apartheid was dismantled. Repressive laws mandating separation of the races were thrown out. The country, which had been carved into a crazy quilt that reserved the most prosperous areas for whites and the most desolate and backward for blacks, was reunited. The dreaded and dangerous security force, which for years had systematically tortured, spied upon, and harassed people of color and their white supporters, was dismantled. But how could this country—one of spectacular beauty and promise—come to terms with its ugly past? How could its people, whom the oppressive white government had pitted against one another, live side by side as friends and neighbors?

To begin the healing process, Nelson Mandela created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, headed by the renowned cleric Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Established in 1995, the commission faced the awesome task of hearing the testimony of the victims of apartheid as well as the oppressors. Amnesty was granted to those who offered a full confession of any crimes associated with apartheid. Since the commission began its work, it has been the central player in a drama that has riveted the country. In this book, Antjie Krog, a South African journalist and poet who has covered the work of the commission, recounts the drama, the horrors, the wrenching personal stories of the victims and their families. Through the testimonies of victims of abuse and violence, from the appearance of Winnie Mandela to former South African president P. W. Botha’s extraordinary courthouse press conference, this award-winning poet leads us on an amazing journey.

(A special thank you to book club member, Jennifer Koen for the suggestion.)

View on Amazon | Bookshop.org (US) | SecondSale used book

Telling People What They Don't Want to Hear

Very few Jews, or whites in general, were openly and vocally adversarial to white domination and the brutality of the post-1948 Afrikaner regime. And very few of the Jews who did oppose apartheid were able to live comfortably with their own Jewishness.

Jock Isacowitz played a key role during the 1940s and 1950s in forging and defending the progressive ideals on which post-apartheid South Africa was built. He was national chairman of the Springbok Legion, the radical ex-servicemen’s “union”, and the brains behind the Torch Commando, the last popular movement to take to the streets against the Apartheid regime.

A member of the Communist Party during WWII, he resigned before the end of the war over its totalitarian approach and subservience to Moscow. He was a founder of the Liberal Party and, in 1955, became the first party member to be issued with a banning order. After the Sharpeville massacre, he was imprisoned under emergency orders. Towards the end of his life, Jock was a radical anti-apartheid activist, a Zionist and a leader of the local Jewish community. As such, he was, if not unique, a rare commodity. Only his sudden illness and death prevented Jock from contributing further to the anti-apartheid opposition.

Written by Jock’s son, Roy, this biography takes an unflinching, second-generation look at a life that intersected with those of Jan Smuts, Alan Paton, Bram Fischer, Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Joe Slovo and many others. A veteran journalist and writer, Roy Isacowitz brings the remarkable character of his father vividly to life, along with the hopes and dreams of his generation.

View on Amazon | Unavailable via Bookshop.org | SecondSale used book

Fools & Other Stories

These stories from the closing days of apartheid rule in South Africa won the Noma Award, Africa's highest literary award, and announced Njabulo Ndebele as an assured and impressive literary voice. He has gone on to become one of the most powerful voices for cultural freedom on the whole of the African continent today.

Ndebele evokes township life with humor and subtlety, rejecting the image of black South Africans as victims and focusing on the complexity and fierce energy of their lives. “Our literature,” says Ndebele, “ought to seek to move away from an easy preoccupation with demonstrating the obvious existence of oppression. It exists. The task is to explore how and why people can survive under such harsh conditions.”

The stories in Fools and Other Stories deal with the formative experiences of growing up in a Johannesburg township during the Apartheid years. “Fools,” the title story of the collection, is a tale of generations. Zamani, a disgraced middle-aged teacher and Zani, a young student activist, are inadvertently bound together by affection and hostility in an intense and unpredictable relationship. Finding each other means finding the common ground of their struggle. It also means re-examining their lives—and, notably, their relationships with women.

View on Amazon | Unavailable via Bookshop.org | SecondSale used book

The Heart of Redness

Shortlisted for the prestigious Commonwealth Writers Prize

In The Heart of Redness, Zakes Mda sets a story of South African village life against a notorious episode from the country's past. The result is a novel of great scope and deep human feeling, of passion and reconciliation.

As the novel opens Camugu, who left for America during apartheid, has returned to Johannesburg. Disillusioned by the problems of the new democracy, he follows his “famous lust” to Qolorha on the remote Eastern Cape. There in the nineteenth century a teenage prophetess named Nonqawuse commanded the Xhosa people to kill their cattle and burn their crops, promising that once they did so the spirits of their ancestors would rise and drive the occupying English into the ocean. The failed prophecy split the Xhosa into Believers and Unbelievers, dividing brother from brother, wife from husband, with devastating consequences.

One hundred fifty years later, the two groups' descendants are at odds over plans to build a vast casino and tourist resort in the village, and Camugu is soon drawn into their heritage and their future—and into a bizarre love triangle as well.

The Heart of Redness is a seamless weave of history, myth, and realist fiction. It is, arguably, the first great novel of the new South Africa—a triumph of imaginative and historical writing.

View on Amazon | Bookshop.org (US) | SecondSale used book

Moxyland

Lauren Beukes’s frighteningly persuasive, high-tech fable follows four narrators living in a dystopian near-future.

Kendra, an art-school dropout, brands herself for a nanotech marketing program. Lerato, an ambitious AIDS baby, plots to defect from her corporate employers. Tendeka, a hot-headed activist, is becoming increasingly rabid. Toby, a roguish blogger, discovers that the video games he plays for cash are much more than they seem.

On a collision course that will rewire their lives, these characters crackle with bold and infectious ideas, connecting a ruthless corporate-apartheid government with video games, biotech attack dogs, slippery online identities, a township soccer school, shocking cell phones, addictive branding, and genetically modified art. Taking hedonistic trends in society to their ultimate conclusions, Lauren Beukes spins a tale of a utopia gone wrong, satirically undermining the idea of progress as society’s white knight.

View on Amazon | Bookshop.org (US) | SecondSale used book

The Quarry

Damon Galgut established himself as a writer of international caliber with the publication of The Good Doctor, which was sold in sixteen countries and was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize and the winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Africa. The Quarry, written ten years ago but never published outside South Africa, is another stark, intense, and crystalline novel in which human nature betrays itself against the desolate backdrop of rural South Africa.

It opens with a chance meeting on a lonely stretch of road, when a man picks up a hitchhiker. The driver is a minister on his way to a new congregation in an isolated village and the passenger, a fugitive from justice. When the minister realizes this, and confronts his passenger overlooking an empty quarry, the response is deadly. As the fugitive and the local police chief play out a tense game of cat and mouse, Damon Galgut gives us a devastating combat for man’s most prized attribute: freedom.

“This taut existential thriller . . . divulges little but manages to suggest volumes. . . . Stark, almost brutal minimalism.” —Boston Globe

View on Amazon | Bookshop.org (US) | SecondSale used book

Waiting for the Barbarians

A modern classic by Nobel Laureate J. M. Coetzee, now a major motion picture starring Robert Pattinson and Johnny Depp

For decades the Magistrate has run the affairs of a tiny frontier settlement, ignoring the impending war between the barbarians and the Empire whose servant he is. When interrogation experts arrive, however, he finds himself jolted into sympathy with their victims—until their barbarous treatment of prisoners of war finally pushes him into a quixotic act of rebellion, and thus into imprisonment as an enemy of the state.
 
Waiting for the Barbarians, J. M. Coetzee’s third novel, which won the James Tate Black Memorial Prize, is an allegory of the war between oppressor and oppressed. The Magistrate is not simply a man living through a crisis of conscience in an obscure place in remote times; his situation is that of all men living in unbearable complicity with regimes that elevate their own survival above justice and decency.

View on Amazon | Bookshop.org (US) | SecondSale used book

Imaginings of Sand

When expatriate Afrikaner Kristien Müller hears of her grandmother's impending death, she ends her self-imposed exile in London and returns to the South Africa she thought she'd escaped. But irrevocable change is sweeping the land, and reality itself seems to be in flux as the country stages its first democratic elections.

Kristien's Ouma Kristina herself is dying because of the upheavals—a terrorist attack on her isolated mansion has terminally injured her. As Kristien keeps vigil by her grandmother's sickbed, Ouma tells Kristien stories of nine generations of women in the family, stories in which myth and reality blur, in which legend and brute fact are confused, in which magic, treachery, farce, and heroism are the stuff of the day-to-day.

Imaginings of Sand is the passionate tale of a nation discovering itself and of the women who pioneered that discovery.

View on Amazon | Bookshop.org (US) | SecondSale used book

I Write What I Like

“The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.” Like all of Steve Biko’s writings, those words testify to the passion, courage, and keen insight that made him one of the most powerful figures in South Africa’s struggle against apartheid. They also reflect his conviction that black people in South Africa could not be liberated until they united to break their chains of servitude, a key tenet of the Black Consciousness movement that he helped found.

I Write What I Like contains a selection of Biko’s writings from 1969, when he became the president of the South African Students’ Organization, to 1972, when he was prohibited from publishing. The collection also includes a preface by Archbishop Desmond Tutu; an introduction by Malusi and Thoko Mpumlwana, who were both involved with Biko in the Black Consciousness movement; a memoir of Biko by Father Aelred Stubbs, his longtime pastor and friend; and a new foreword by Professor Lewis Gordon.

Biko’s writings will inspire and educate anyone concerned with issues of racism, postcolonialism, and black nationalism.

View on Amazon | Bookshop.org (US) | SecondSale used book

The Good Doctor

A finalist for the Man Booker Prize, The Good Doctor is a taut, intense tale of the dashed hopes of the postapartheid era and the small betrayals that doom a friendship.

When Laurence Waters arrives at his new post at a deserted rural hospital, staff physician Frank Eloff is instantly suspicious. Laurence is young, optimistic, and full of big ideas–everything Frank, hardened and embittered by years of irrelevancy and disappointment in the “bush,” is not. Frank watches with a mixture of bemusement and irritation as Laurence sets about trying to bring the hospital and its diffident staff back to life.

The whole town is beset with new arrivals and the return of old faces. Frank reestablishes a secret romantic liaison with a local woman, one that will have unexpected consequences for him, for her, and even for Laurence. The Brigadier, an African who shaped himself into a local dictator during apartheid days, is rumored to be back in town, and active in cross-border smuggling. A group of soldiers has moved in to track him, and to close the borders, led by a man from Frank’s own dark past. Laurence sees only possibilities—but in a world where the past is demanding restitution from the present, his ill-starred idealism cannot last. When the final denouement comes, who will make the cynical choice, and who the moral one?

“Like most elements of this slim, absorbing novel set in post-apartheid South Africa, the title is ambiguous. The narrator, Frank, is a doctor, but, to judge from our first impression, not a good one. . . . The novel shrewdly introduces thriller-like devices. . . . Galgut spins a brisk and bracing story, but he’s also in pursuit of something murkier: the double-edged nature of doing good in a land where ‘the past has only just happened.”’ –The New Yorker

(A special thank you to book club member, Jennifer Koen for the suggestion.)

View on Amazon | Bookshop.org (US) | SecondSale used book