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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.)

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A Change of Tongue

In times of fundamental change, people tend to find a space, lose it and the find another space as life and the world transform around them. 

What does this metamorphosis entail and in what ways are we affected by it? How do we live through it and what may we become on our journey toward each other, particularly when the space and places form which we depart are at least on the surface so vastly different?

Ranging freely and often wittily across many terrains, this brave book by one of South Africa s foremost writers and poets provides a unique and compelling discourse on living creatively in Africa today.

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

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Gardening at Night

Gardening at Night follows the unfolding of a young girl's life through a childhood filled with silences, through adolescence and young womanhood. It is about how much people are the total of their longings, how high drama can also be low comedy. It probes how much of the old century a girl should take with her into the new one, and examines the merging of families in the Eighties and their emerging into the florescence of the Nineties and beyond. It is especially the story of a girl's escape from a ghost town.

The South African mining town of Kimberley was created over a hundred years ago when men with buckets scraped out the insides of the earth like a thousand black dentists. Now it is a place where the only tales are those of leaving.

Gardening at Night is feisty, and funky, and funny. And even in moments of bleakness and shock Diane Awerbuck's brand of wry humour turns this unusual and amazing first novel into a remarkable reading adventure. This is a South Africa the international reader has not yet seen: the wood of smallness and ordinariness and quirkiness of everyday life hidden behind the trees of politics.” —André Brink, award-winning author

“This coming-of-age tale is the perfect debut, playing to the debutante's freshness and flaws, and Awerbuck has turned in a bittersweet example of the genre.” —Observer

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

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Best White and Other Anxious Delusions

Rebecca Davis has been described as one of the funniest writers in South Africa today. Her razor-sharp wit combines with her acute powers of observation to produce social and political commentary that will have you in stitches even as it informs and provokes you to think seriously about the topics she discusses.

“The pesky thing about history is that you can’t just take it off and hang it up, like a coat. In a generation’s time, maybe being a Best White will seem as outdated and irrelevant a performance as someone who arrives at work on rollerblades. Till then, you’ll find us checking our privilege. And then checking to make sure everyone’s noticed.” —Rebecca Davis, the author

“From start to finish, Davis’ bone-dry humour and clever wit makes her first dossier of anecdotes even more entertaining than Buzzfeed on any given day Best White and Other Anxious Delusions is, in one word: brilliant.” —W24

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

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Portrait with Keys

This dazzling portrait of Johannesburg is one of the most haunting, poetic pieces of reportage about a metropolis since Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City. Through precisely crafted snapshots, Ivan Vladislavic observes the unpredictable, day-today transformation of his embattled city: the homeless using manholes as cupboards, a public statue slowly cannibalized for scrap. Most poignantly he charts the small, devastating changes along the postapartheid streets: walls grow higher, neighborhoods are gated off, the keys multiply. Security—insecurity?—is the growth industry.

Vladislavic, described as “one of the most imaginative minds at work in South African literature today” (André Brink), delivers “one of the best things ever written about a great, if schizophrenic, city, and an utterly true picture of the new South Africa” (Christopher Hope).

“Surely one of the most ingenious love letters—full of violence, fear, humour, and cunning—ever addressed to a city.” —Geoff Dyer, multi award-winning author

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

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Charm

A unique South African urban fantasy focused on a gritty, magical Johannesburg filled with interesting, yet flawed characters…

Irene Kerry has grown up with the memory of her mother's suicide, and has been in love with her gay best friend Rain for as long as she can remember.

She thinks she's dealing with both just fine until the day her best friend falls in love with a much older man. A man who knew her mother, and believes Irene is a magician like her.

In order to protect her friend and family, Irene gets dragged into a hunt for an ancient magician who steals and eats magic, and discovers that the things she thought she knew about her mother's death were all lies.

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Welcome to Our Hillbrow

Welcome to Our Hillbrow is an exhilarating and disturbingride through the chaotic and hyper-real zone of Hillbrow—microcosm of all that is contradictory, alluring, and painful in the postapartheid South African psyche. Everything is there: the shattered dreams of youth, sexuality and its unpredictable costs, AIDS, xenophobia, suicide, the omnipotent violence that often cuts short the promise of young people’s lives, and the Africanist understanding of the life continuum that does not end with death but flows on into an ancestral realm.

Infused with the rhythms of the inner-city pulsebeat, this courageous novel is compelling in its honesty and its broad vision, which links Hillbrow, rural Tiragalong, and Oxford. It spills out the guts of Hillbrow—living with the same energy and intimate knowledge with which the Drum writers wrote Sophiatown into being.

“In Welcome to Our Hillbrow, Mpe captured the dislocation and despair of people who moved in the late ’90s from rural South Africa to Hillbrow, a rough neighborhood in downtown Johannesburg with overcrowded high-rises and a large population of immigrants from elsewhere in Africa. In the South African literary imagination, Hillbrow has come to represent everything frightening and promising about the new South Africa; it is at once a scene of drugs, crime and xenophobia toward immigrants and also what theorists enthusiastically call ‘Afropolitan,’ a space that transcends national boundaries.” —The New York Times

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

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The Elephant Whisperer

Lawrence Anthony devoted his life to animal conservation, protecting the world's endangered species. Then he was asked to accept a herd of "rogue" wild elephants on his Thula Thula game reserve in Zululand. His common sense told him to refuse, but he was the herd's last chance of survival: they would be killed if he wouldn't take them.

In order to save their lives, Anthony took them in. In the years that followed he became a part of their family. And as he battled to create a bond with the elephants, he came to realize that they had a great deal to teach him about life, loyalty, and freedom.

The Elephant Whisperer is a heartwarming, exciting, funny, and sometimes sad memoir of Anthony's experiences with these huge yet sympathetic creatures. Set against the background of life on an African game reserve, with unforgettable characters and exotic wildlife, Anthony's unrelenting efforts at animal protection and his remarkable connection with nature will inspire animal lovers and adventurous souls everywhere.

“…Anthony’s bone-deep mission is bracing and his courage is inspiring.” —Kirkus Reviews

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The Restless Supermarket

Winner of the South African Sunday Times Fiction Prize

It is 1993, and Aubrey Tearle’s world is shutting down. He has recently retired from a lifetime of proofreading telephone directories. His favourite neighbourhood haunt in Johannesburg, the Café Europa, is about to close its doors; the familiar old South Africa is already gone. Standards, he grumbles, are in decline, so bad-tempered, conservative Tearle embarks on a grandiose plan to enlighten his fellow citizens. The results are disastrous, hilarious and poignant.

A classic novel about the post-apartheid era, brimming with surprising perspectives, urban satire, riotous imagery and outrageous wordplay.

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

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Dragonfriend

Gold Award winner - 2016 Independent Publisher Book Awards

Stabbed. Burned by a dragon. Abandoned for the windrocs to pick over. The traitor Ra’aba tried to silence Hualiama forever. But he reckoned without the strength of a dragonet’s paw, and the courage of a girl who refused to die.

Only an extraordinary friendship will save Hualiama’s beloved kingdom of Fra’anior and restore the King to the Onyx Throne.

Flicker, the valiant dragonet. Hualiama, a foundling, adopted into the royal family. The power of a friendship which paid the ultimate price.

This is the tale of Hualiama Dragonfriend, and a love which became legend.

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Jock of the Bushveld

Jock of the Bushveld is the classic and much-loved story based on the true experiences of Sir Percy Fitzpatrick and his Staffordshire bull terrier, Jock.

The story begins in the 1880s, at the time of the South African gold rush, when a young Fitzpatrick worked as an ox-wagon transport rider in the old Transvaal. There he came across a man who was in the process of drowning a puppy, the runt of the litter. He saved the dog and the story of his ever-faithful and loving companion was born.

First published in 1907, Jock of the Bushveld has been reprinted many times since. Now, with a fresh and engaging cover, and in a new (and handy) medium-sized paperback format, this timeless South African classic retains the charm of the original story along with the original illustrations by Edmund Caldwell.

It will no doubt continue to be enjoyed by children and adults alike.

Please keep in mind that older books include some things nowadays considered unsavory, outdated, or wrong such as racism.

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Spud

Spud is one of those books which could easily be dismissed as nothing more than an adolescent read at first glance, but once you pick it up, it's almost as if the pages turn themselves. All in all, a wonderful book.” —Metrobeat

Spud is a scholarship student at an elite boys' boarding school in South Africa writing down his disturbing yet often hilarious exploits in his diary. As the year begins, the president decriminalizes the African National Congress and releases Nelson Mandela from prison, but not even these massive cultural changes can get pre-pubescent boys to think about something other than girls or stop them from playing tricks on one another.

John “Spud” Milton takes his first hilarious steps toward manhood in this delicious, laugh-out-loud boarding school romp, full of midnight swims, raging hormones, and catastrophic holidays that will leave the entire family in hysterics and thirsty for more.

“Funny, fast-paced, and wonderfully observant...” —The Daily News

“Funniest book of the year.” —The Citizen

Spud is South Africa's Catcher in the Rye.” —Alexander McCall Smith, author of the The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency

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The Story of an African Farm

The Story of an African Farm (first published in 1883) marks an early appearance in fiction of Victorian society’s emerging New Woman. The novel follows the spiritual quests of Lyndall and Waldo, who each struggle against social constraints in their search for happiness and truth: Lyndall, against society’s expectations of women, and Waldo against stifling class conventions.

Written from the margins of the British empire, the novel addresses the conflicts of race, class, and gender that shaped the lives of European settlers in Southern Africa before the Boer Wars.

Highly acclaimed ever since its first publication in 1883 for the bold manner in which it dealt with some of the issues of the day, it also caused some controversy over its frank portrayal of freethought, feminism, premarital sex, pregnancy out of wedlock, & cross dressing.

Please keep in mind that older books include some things nowadays considered unsavory, outdated, or wrong such as racism.

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Obsidian Worlds

Jason Werbeloff’s short stories have been downloaded over 50,000 times. Obsidian Worlds brings together his 11 best-selling sci-fi shorts into a mind-bending philosophical anthology.

In Your Averaged Joe, a man’s headache is large enough to hold the multiverse. Q46F is an obsessive-compulsive android who finds love in a zombie-embroiled apocalypse. The end of the world isn’t all that bad – The Experience Machine will fulfill your every desire (and some you hadn’t considered). A sex bot dares to dream of freedom in Dinner with Flexi. But mind what you eat, because The Photons in the Cheese Are Lost. Don’t fret though: The Cryo Killer guarantees that your death will be painless, or your money back when you’re thawed. Unless, that is, you’re The Man with Two Legs.

Plug into Obsidian Worlds for these and other immersive stories, including the hilarious Time-Traveling Chicken Sexer.

Your brain will never be the same again.

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Strong Medicine

Erin du Toit's 9-year old daughter has been kidnapped by Johannesburg's most powerful witchdoctor. Can Erin save her child before she's chopped up for muthi?

Erin’s first instinct is to go to the police, but the South African Police Force is paralyzed by corruption and overwhelmed by hundreds of open cases. Cases just like Erin’s.

Erin delves into the dark underbelly of Johannesburg to find the man who took her daughter. When she realizes that the police are protecting him, she must decide between disobeying a violent police force and giving up on her daughter.

Strong Medicine is an unsettling and engrossing jaunt through the high streets and back alleys of Johannesburg. Filled with memorably kick-ass women, a poignant take on suspended grief, and a plot that will keep you on your toes, this is the perfect book for late nights and bad dreams.” —Dirge Magazine

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Into the Planet

From one of the world’s most renowned cave divers, a firsthand account of exploring the earth’s final frontier: the hidden depths of our oceans and the sunken caves inside our planet

More people have died exploring underwater caves than climbing Mount Everest, and we know more about deep space than we do about the depths of our oceans. From one of the top cave divers working today—and one of the very few women in her field—Into the Planet blends science, adventure, and memoir to bring readers face-to-face with the terror and beauty of earth’s remaining unknowns and the extremes of human capability.

Jill Heinerth—the first person in history to dive deep into an Antarctic iceberg and leader of a team that discovered the ancient watery remains of Mayan civilizations—has descended farther into the inner depths of our planet than any other woman. She takes us into the harrowing split-second decisions that determine whether a diver makes it back to safety, the prejudices that prevent women from pursuing careers underwater, and her endeavor to recover a fallen friend’s body from the confines of a cave. But there’s beauty beyond the danger of diving, and while Heinerth swims beneath our feet in the lifeblood of our planet, she works with biologists discovering new species, physicists tracking climate change, and hydrogeologists examining our finite freshwater reserves.

Written with hair-raising intensity, Into the Planet is the first book to deliver an intimate account of cave diving, transporting readers deep into inner space, where fear must be reconciled and a mission’s success balances between knowing one’s limits and pushing the envelope of human endurance.

“Breathtaking . . . Written in cinematic detail, Into the Planet is a thrilling portrait of bravery, innovation, and the extreme limits of human capability. . . . one of the most hair-raising accounts of extreme exploration I’ve read in recent memory.” —Gizmodo

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