This is modern Lusaka, Zambia, where the line between magic and religion is blurred, the arcane and the mundane muddle and nothing is what it seems. Luse is a sharp street child combing the gang-ridden city in a desperate search for Doctor Georgia Shapiro who she hopes can offer her a way back into her once-bright past. The doctor is trying to unravel the mystery of a friend,s sudden death while attending to the AIDS crisis laying waste to the country around her. Meanwhile The Blood Of Christ Church and its enigmatic leader Priestess Selena Clark gain popularity with their murky promises of salvation and violent clandestine rituals. A small silver box links them in ways they cannot foretell. It will force Luse and Georgia to question who they trust, who they are and for whom they fight. Tanvi Bush's Witch girl is a crime thriller that juggles the past and the present effortlessly, blending AIDS activism, witchcraft, religious extremism and romance to create a well-paced narrative. Luse is so feisty, charming and resourceful that you'll miss her after you finish the book.
'... the past was not yet done with here, I thought to myself; its problems drip-fed into the present, muddying it endlessly.'South Africa in a time of transition: a world of shifting boundaries and fluid identities, under siege from the relentless power of the past.In this evocative and finely crafted debut collection, De Villiers deftly probes the ambiguities of this changing country. From the older woman with her much younger lover, trapped in Johannesburg traffic during 'load shedding' - the new leveler - to the 'gap year' graduates seeking some kind of permanence abroad, each story manages to contain entire worlds. These are lives of unconscious longing; of individuals - often willingly - cast adrift from their history, animated here in poetic yet pared-down prose.
A dazzling collection from across the African continent and diaspora - here SHORT STORY DAY AFRICA has assembled the best nineteen stories from their 2013 competition. Food is at the centre of stories from authors emerging and established, blending the secular, the supernatural, the old and the new in a spectacular celebration of short fiction. Civil wars, evictions, vacations, feasts and romances - the stories we bring to our tables that bring us together and tear us apart.
Swimming with Cobras is a memoir about a journey to find a foothold in a foreign land grappling with its own identity, offering rare and important insight into a corner of South Africa's past. Rosemary Smithis life as an activist in the Eastern Cape began when she moved from England with her South African born husband in the mid-1960s. They made their home in Grahamstown where they raised four children. As a member of the Black Sash she participated in events spanning three decades in an intensely politicised and oppressed province. Through her involvement she made the transition to full integration in a country that at first struck her as alien and strange.
Love Interrupted is set partially in the university town of Grahamstown and partially in rural Limpopo. The stories in this collection have an intimate feel, like conversations eavesdropped on. We hear the voices of black South African women, many of whom have to endure their husbands, nyatsis (mistresses), their abuse or both. Some cope by turning to church, others by turning a blind eye and some, like the narrator of ,Vicious Cycle,, by seeking to understand the legacy of South Africa,s past and the effects of migrant labour on its men. Despite serious themes of patriarchy and racism, there is much humour and lightness in the stories, as in ,Bridal Shower,, in which the narrator encounters a male stripper for the first time, and in ,Toy Boy,, in which a woman befriends the gigolo next door. This is an engaging collection full or rich characters you won,t forget, from Lebo, whose dream is take over the business of her domestic worker,s mother,s boss, and uses a witchdoctor to punish her detractors to MmaPhuti, who spikes her famous ginger-beer with whiskey.
Journeys & arrivals in strange & magical places - a kaleidoscopic collection of stories by Africa's younger writers. Follow the Road is a collection of stories pushing against the grain of right vs wrong. It is an anthology of unique perspectives, ideas and dreams.
Life wasn't always this hard for fourteen-year-old Mvelo, who lives with her mother, Zola in the shacks on the margins of Mkhumbane township. There were good times when they lived with Sipho, Zola's lawyer boyfriend. But when the beautiful and mysterious Nonceba Hlathi arrives, Zola has to make a choice. She also has her pride. Now their social grants have been discontinued: the one for Mvelo being underage reared by a 31-year-old single mother, and the other for Zola because of her status. And there is also an elephant growing in their shack as the terrible thing that happened that night in the revival tent remains unspoken. In her second novel, Futhi Ntshingila once again introduces us to a cast of strong women who have little, but are determined to shape their own destinies.
Armed robbery is nothing new in South Africa. But when a pair of clever and squeaky-sounding criminals go on a looting spree that rocks several small towns in the Eastern Cape, Detective Inspector Thabisa Tswane from The Eagles, the Special Violent Crimes Unit is called to work the case. There,s only one problem, one of the most important witnesses in the case is her estranged grandfather, Chief Solenkosi, who ordered her violent expulsion from the village over ten years ago. In another world of lunches at the Michelangelo, private game lodges and platinum cards, the rich and slick Ollis Sando smoothes his way through cocktail parties and networking meetings. He is rumoured to be in line for the presidency in the upcoming elections. But he has a dirty past, something to hide and a hostage to hide it for him. In Now I See You Thabisa,s traditional and professional skills will be pushed to the limit. She will have to learn the difference between looking and seeing. And in stirring twists of fate, we,ll see that past and present blur, everything is interconnected and nothing can be assumed.
Hester's Book of Bread is an honest and delicious, down to earth book that tells of Hester van der Walt's passion for baking bread. Set in McGregor in the Klein Karoo where she bakes bread in a wood-fired oven, this book reflects Hester's intuitive feeling for the connections between the soul and food, particularly food that is prepared with care, according to traditional principles and methods. Hester's Book of Bread is infused with a fine sense of humour, helpful hints and mouth-watering recipes. It's a book as irresistible as the smell of bread fresh from the oven.
As we have come to expect with Joan Metelerkamp's work, these poems can be read individually or, more rewardingly, as a body, from cover to cover. Formal but fluent, the 'sonnets' ('soundings') of this sequence marry cycle and narrative, old and new, secular and sacred, momentary and eternal. This is a strange and immediately familiar book -: at its simplest it traces the story of a mother's 'letting-go' her grown children, a daughter's relocation to the Northern hemisphere, a wedding, shadows of deaths and losses, sparks of joy. It recalls the story of Demeter and Persephone, but goes on from there in immediately accessible South African, contemporary terms. Above all, it celebrates!
Turning her back on what is considered conventional, Makhosazana Xaba engages with her subject-matter on a revolutionary level in Running and Other Stories. She takes tradition , be that literary tradition, cultural tradition, gender tradition , and re-imagines it in a way that is liberating and innovative. Bracketed by Xaba,s revisitings of Can Themba,s influential short story, The Suit, the ten stories in this collection, while strongly independent, are in conversation with one another, resulting in a collection that can be devoured all at once or savoured slowly, story by story. By re-envisioning the ordinary and accepted, Xaba is creating a space in which women,s voices are given a rebirth.
A debut collection of poems from popular performance poet, Khadija Heeger. The collection is the first in a trilogy of poems that Heeger has worked on over many years. This collection is a combination of story-telling, resistance, re-naming, remembering. The language of the book is personal to the poet and reflects the wider community and society she is part of. She mixes languages, English and Afrikaans, and the language of the Cape called Kaaps.
Life at boarding school is not all diets, dresses and dances, as Trinity Luhabe discovers when her parents move overseas for a term. She has hardly settled into Sisulu House when she finds herself caught up in the most unexpected love triangle of her life. Zach is the school sports hero, while James is different to anyone she's ever met. One of them wants to control her ... the other holds the key to an old secret that has been buried for a very long time. Will Trinity figure out who to trust before it's too late?
An old man is woken up by the wailing of a prophetess. Sitting on the veranda and staring into the dry veld he is beset with images of snakes hiding in the cellar beneath him. His peace is further disturbed by visits from his angry daughter, Susanna. Memories of his childhood on a remote mission station in Venda come flooding in. Johannes remembers his fatheris internment at Koffiefontein during World War II, leaving him and his sister free to make friendships, explore the mythical forests that surround their house and to connect with the spirit world of the Bavenda . On his return, the missionary tries to impose order on the mission station with tragic consequences.
Absent Tongues is Kelwyn Sole's sixth collection of poetry; a collection that speaks of tenderness, anger, ambivalence and fear. This is territory Kelwyn has long made his own - hymnal vignettes that thread the landscape of South Africa with patterns of myth and people, with pasts, presents, and, at times, with futures. We come away from these poems with something akin to nostalgia, something like a yearning to belong in the most fundamental sense - to be water, air, bone, sky. Kelwyn Sole writes with grace, acuity and with thoughtful philosophical purpose, affirming his position in the forefront of contemporary South African poetry.
Eloquent Body explores the juxtaposition of healing and creativity both from a personal as well as medical point of view. Dawn Garisch works as a medical doctor and a writer in equal measure and advocates dialogue between our bodies and our creative selves. Her novel Trespass was nominated for the Commonwealth Prize in Africa.
The hemispheric pull between Europe and Africa and the restlessness that results from inhabiting both worlds is reflected in A Lioness at my Heels. Robin Winckel-Mellish reconciles the muted tones of her Europe with the riotous colour of Africa. The immediacy, vividness and dustiness of the harsh African sun is carefully offset by the softer quality of the Netherlands. All poems are mediated and considered in the light of a spiritual home. Robin Winckel-Mellish lives in the Netherlands and runs a poetry critique group in Amsterdam. Her work has been published in many international literary journals. Her first collection, A Lioness at my Heels, explores living in Europe and being South African.
Forty-two poems by Dawn Garisch, a doctor who writes, a poet who walks, a researcher who dances. She lives in Cape Town near the mountain and the sea and has two grown sons. Her last novel, Trespass, was nominated for the Commonwealth Prize in Africa.
'These are poems of drowning and coming up again. Of surviving with lungs that breathe water and sunlight. These are poems of longing and loss. Of searching for a foothold in a world where all slides and changes. Sarah Frost is a new voice in South African poetry. A clear and strong and exciting voice. Read her.'- Kobus Moolman Sarah Frost is 37 years old and a single mother to a six year old boy. She works as an editor for Juta Legalbrief in Durban, South Africa. Sarah has been writing poetry for the past fourteen years. She has completed an MA in English Literature, and also a module on Creative Writing.
Melissa Butler lives in Cape Town and Pittsburgh, PA. In the US, she teaches kindergarten. In South Africa, she writes and works with pre schools in the Eastern Cape. She has a Masters degree in Curriculum Theory from Penn State University and a Masters degree in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town. This is her first book of poetry.
"Home is as old as one's skin but as elusive as an object seen through the wrong end of a telescope." It is this sense of a view, skewed, intangible, which echoes throughout Karen Lazar's Hemispheres. Waking in hospital after a post-operative stroke, she finds one side of her body paralysed and her world knocked out of kilter. Spatial, perceptual and subjective changes force her to view her new life in facets. The fragmented view is made apparent by means of a triptych of clusters which charts Karen's experience from Metamorphosis, through Rehabilitation and Adaptation. Quietly reflective, deeply lyrical, Hemispheres is concerned with returning separated parts into a whole and coming home to the self.
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