"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."
~ Douglas Adams
"Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass."
~ Anton Chekhov
"Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple."
~ Dr. Suess
I love this time of year. I love the plane trees just beginning to turn gold, with the promise of autumn ahead. I love getting a scruffy garden into the last of summer shape. I love my vegetable garden with plants straining to produce their fruit before the sun holds no warmth and they are […]
Star Rating: ★★★★★ 5/5 What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky Lesley Nneka Arimah Riverhead Books, April 2017 Online Price: R380 Lesley Nneka Arimah’s debut is a vibrant collection of 12 compelling stories set in the US and Nigeria. From fantastical myths to a post-apocalyptic world, all the shorts are […]
Star Rating: ★★★☆☆ 3/5 Colour Me Yellow Thuli Nhlapo Kwela Books, September 2017 Online Price: R246 Reading Colour Me Yellow, I felt like an adult watching helplessly over a child’s unfolding plight. A relentlessly heart-breaking story of rejection – first by Thuli’s own mother, then by society, because she is different – this […]
It’s now so long ago it hardly happened: the Christmas summer holiday break. Never has any country so embraced dropping everything and just being. I suspect, though, that many of us, exhausted by the year, find difficulty ‘just being’. One of the avenues of discussion I find difficult to understand is doing nothing. My idea […]
Star Rating: ★★★☆☆ 3/5 A Jigsaw of Fire and Stars Yaba Badoe Head of Zeus, September 2017 Online Price: R216 If book covers are anything to go by—they shouldn’t be, but they are—this one draws you in immediately. It is a beauty, and tells you straight away that A Jigsaw of Fire and […]
Star Rating: ★★★★☆ 4/5 Ghana Must Go Taiye Selasi Penguin Books, January 2014 Online Price: R189 He stares at the glittering, arrested by beauty, and knows what he knew all those winters ago: that when faced with a thing that is fragile in a world that is ugly and crushing and cruel the correct […]
Wherever you look there are books. Marvellous books on groaning shelves. And the pity of this end of year literary orgy is that you can’t buy everything. What an extraordinary year of fact and fiction there has been. Until three months ago, it seemed that it would be a year of stellar fiction. I still […]
Thank goodness. It’s enough with the book awards for 2017. It’s also enough with the book festivals for 2017. We need a break now that the Booker Prize 2017 has come and gone. Now it’s time for whatever peace we can find as we run down the steep slope towards the end of a turbulent […]
Star Rating: ★★★★☆ 4/5 When Rain Clouds Gather Bessie Head Little Brown, August 2010 (originally published 1968) Online Price: R180 Bessie Head is one of southern Africa’s hidden gems. Like most people I was introduced to her because her books were part of my school’s syllabus – and since then I have long […]
Twenty years ago a distinguished and influential South African publisher rubbed his hands together and said: “Now that we have our freedom I’m looking forward to the great South African novel.” Our Gone With the Wind, our To Kill a Mockingbird, is yet to be written. But what is happening in our vital local book […]
