Book 97 - MAR 25, 2025 - TUE
THE HEART OF REDNESS: A NOVEL
by Zakes Mda
Camugu, who left for America during the Apartheid, has returned. He goes to the Eastern Cape village of Qolorha, where in the 1850s a prophetess told the Xhosa people to kill their cattle and burn their crops, so the spirits of their ancestors would drive the occupying English into the ocean. The failed prophecy split the Xhosa into Believers, who supported the profecy, and Unbelievers, who rejected it and embraced colonial adaptation.
One hundred fifty years later, the two groups’ decedents are at odds over plans to build a casino and tourist resort in the village: whether to welcome the new project or preserve their ancestral way of life. Camugu is soon drawn into that vendetta, and into a love triangle as well.
Rich in history, this novel published in 2000 places side by side past and present, revealing how unresolved traumas continue to influence South African contemporary politics. It explores themes of colonialism, resistance, cultural identity, and the tension between tradition and modernization.
Book 89 - MAR 17, 2025 - MON
ZOO CITY
Zoo City (2010) is a science fiction novel set in a fantastic version of Johannesburg. It follows Zinzi December, a former journalist and recovering drug addict who has a sloth on her back, in a world where criminals acquire supernatural animals that are bonded to them.
Zinzi, who has a talent for tracking down lost objects and missing people, is hired by a music producer to locate a female member of a brother-and-sister pop duet, a job that can be her ticket out of Zoo City, where she resides after being involved in an email scam that led to a tragic death.
Instead, she´s catapulted deeper into a city perverted by crime and dark magic, as she attempts to find the pop star in order to use the reward to pay off her debt to a Zoo City drug dealer. Lauren Beukes's prose brings Johannesburg’s dystopian streets into life, weaving a vibrant and eclectic mélange of drugs, sex, music, refugees, voodoo, and brutal humanity.
Book 81 - MAR 09, 2025 - Sun
SPUD
It´s a fictional diary of a 13-year-old boy in South Africa in the early 1990s, John "Spud" Milton, who enters an all-boys boarding elite school near Durban. Navigating adolescence, friendship, and the chaos of dorm life, Spud ends up in a group called "The Crazy Eight".
Spud writes about his eccentric family, his homesickness, his life at school, and his first experiences with love. Meanwhile, as a scarcely mentioned historical backdrop, his country is undergoing political change.
It´s a funny book with all kinds of sweet, frightening, and sad about growing up, and it became a bestseller in South Africa that led to three sequels, as well as a film adaptation.
Book 73 - MAR 01, 2025 - SAT
In South Africa under the Apartheid, Mehring, a rich industrialist, has all money can buy, but the people around him refuse to be objects: his wife, son, and mistress leave him; his foreman and workers become indifferent to his stewardship.
On a whim, he buys a farm to connect himself with the land and find a higher meaning in life. But he knows nothing about farming, and the property is entirely run by black workers. Ultimately, even the land rises up, as drought, then flood, destroy his farm.
Nobel Prize laureate Nadine Gordimer, in The Conservationist (1974), explores themes of power, race, land ownership, and the unsettling sense of disconnection, of never truly belonging, in a country on the brink of inevitable change.
Book 65 - FEB 21, 2025 - fri
LIKE CLOCKWORK: A CLARE HART MISTERY
Like Clockwork is a crime thriller that exposes the porn and prostitution industry in today's South Africa and introduces journalist and police profiler Clare Hart.
It begins with a young woman found murdered on Cape Town's Sea Point promenade, her body meticulously arranged on the beach sands, suggesting a serial killer at work. As more bodies appear, Clare is drawn into the depths of the city´s criminal underworld.
Clare, a documentary filmmaker specializing in crimes against women, ends up confronting her own past traumas while racing to stop the killer before more women fall victim. The novel weaves psychological suspense with a critique of gender violence in South Africa. Orford’s writing is fast-paced and brings Cape Town to life with its contrasts of beauty and brutality.
Book 57 - FEB 13, 2025 - thu
It´s a novel about Helena Verbloem, a middle-aged lexicographer who relocates to Durban to work on a dictionary of near-extinction Afrikaans words. Helena´s orderly world is disrupted when her apartment is burglarized, and her collection of shells that she had been gathering for a lifetime is stolen.
In face of the local police´s indifference, she decides to search for the collection on her own. In the process, she reflects on life - her ex-husband, her daughter, her lovers, her childhood - and falls in love with her married boss.
By means of Helena´s journey, the author delves into the tension between order and chaos, the desire for certainty in an unpredictable world, and how unexpected events and life’s randomness shape our experiences.
Book 49 - FEB 05, 2025 - WED
by Damon Galgut
The Promise is a 2021 novel that follows a white South African family for four decades, before and after Apartheid, featuring Manie, his wife Rachel, their children Anton, Astrid, and Amor.
On her deathbed, Rachel promised a house to Salome, a Black woman who has worked for the family her whole life. But the promise remains unfulfilled, not least because then Salome could not legally own property under the Apartheid laws.
As the decades pass, the promise haunts them. In 1995, post-Apartheid, the siblings reunite at the family farm outside Pretoria to finally decide on it. In this saga of a fading clan, the question is: Can you escape the repercussions of a broken promise?
Book 41 - Jan 28, 2025 - tue
by Deon Meyer
Deon Meyer is a South African thriller novelist, writing primarily in Afrikaans. In Seven Days, Cape Town homicide detective Bennie Griessel investigates the killing of two police officers allegedly complicit in covering up the murder of a lawyer named Hanneke Sloet, stabbed in her luxury apartment.
Sloet's ex-boyfriend, who works at a vineyard, had the means to kill her, but his alibi holds up under scrutiny.
And then, another cop is shot. The shooter reaches out the media. Pressure ramps up on Griessel.
To further complicate his life, his girlfriend Alexa Bernard suffers an accident.
Seven Days´s protagonist Bennie Griessel also features in other novels by Meyer, such as Thirteen Hours and Leo.
Book 33 - Jan 20, 2025 - MON
Margaret Crowley, handsome, clever, and rich, was living a good life with little distress. It was hardly to be foreseen that in her fifty-sixth year she would kill a man with a kitchen knife.
Her husband had left her for a younger man after twenty-six years of marriage, obliging her to rethink her life entirely. Opting to leave behind family and friends, she moves to a seaside town with her dog, intent upon a simple, uncluttered existence.
But simplicity can become complicated. As a young man enters her life, apparently intent upon establishing himself as a general-purpose handyman and cook, she finds herself torn between distrust and attraction. Is he the helpful and cheerful man he seems, or is there a darker purpose to his assistance?
Set in contemporary South Africa, the novel has a lively cast of supporting characters: Margaret's best friend, Frieda, her son, Carl, her daughter, Celia, and her opinionated housemaid Rebecca. Friends and family may not be left behind at will. And new acquaintances may not be what they seem.
Book 25 - Jan 12, 2025 - Sun
BORN A CRIME: STORIES FROM A SOUTH AFRICAN CHILDHOOD
by Trevor Noah
Noah’s path from Apartheid to fame began with a criminal act: his birth. He was born to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother at a time when such a union was punishable by five years in prison. He was kept mostly indoors for the earliest years of his life, bound by measures his mother took to hide him from a government that could, at any moment, steal him away.
Finally liberated by the end of Apartheid, Noah´s family set forth on a grand adventure, in which his mother was determined to save him from the cycle of poverty, violence, and abuse that often loomed over boys like him.
It´s a collection of hilarious and dramatic stories. Whether subsisting on caterpillars for dinner during hard times, being thrown from a moving car during an attempted kidnapping, or just trying to survive the life-and-death pitfalls of dating in high school, Noah illuminates his past with keen frankness and humour.
BOOK 20 - JAN 07, 2025 - TUE
by Alan Paton
Published in 1948, this classic is set in the prelude to Apartheid in the 1940s. It follows a rural Zulu priest, Stephen Kumalo, as he travels to Johannesburg in search of his missing son. His quest turns into a reckoning with the harsh realities of urban life, crime, racial division, and his own family disarray.
Kumalo meets Arthur Jarvis, a white farmer mourning his murdered son who happened to be a passionate advocate for racial justice. Kumalo´s son is the accused of the incidental murder. Both fathers embark on their own painful journey of understanding, as they try to grapple with the racial inequalities that shaped their fates.
Cry, the Beloved Country is about personal tragedy, Apartheid, reconciliation, and the possibility of healing in a divided land.
BOOK 15 - JAN 02, 2025 - THU
Published in 2014, The Reactive, Masande Ntshanga first novel, is about a young HIV+ man grappling with the sudden death of his younger brother, for which he feels unduly responsible.
Lindanathi and his friends make their living working low-paying jobs and selling anti-retroviral drugs (during the period in South Africa before ARVs became broadly distributed). In between, they inhale glue to get high, drift in and out of parties, and navigate the streets of Cape Town, observing the material disparities of their country.
One day, a masked man appears seeking to buy their surplus of ARVs, an offer that could mean for them the opportunity to escape their environs, while at the same time forcing Lindanathi to confront his path and, ultimately, his past.
BOOK 10 - DEC 28, 2024 - Sat
by J.M. Coetzee
Set in post-Apartheid South Africa, this novel tells the story of David Lurie, a twice divorced university professor in Cape Town. He has created a stable and comfortable routine for himself: he lives within his financial means, teaches his classes about literature dutifully, and meets the same prostitute weekly.
But when he harasses and seduces one of his students, he sets in motion a chain of events that will unsettle his life and leave him disgraced.
He moves to his only daughter´s house in the countryside as he attempts to find meaning in his one remaining family relationship. Instead, an incident of unimaginable terror and violence forces father and daughter to confront the hard racial issues of South Africa.
BOOK 5 - DEC 23, 2024 - Mon
THE ROAD TO MECCA
by Athol Fugard
It´s a play inspired by the real life of Helen Martins, an elderly widow in rural apartheid-era South Africa who struggles to create an eccentric sculpture garden called her dream trip to Mecca, which later became The Owl House, a National Heritage site.
Marius, a concerned friend and conservative pastor, urges her to abandon the intent and move to a senior home, while Elsa, a Cape Town schoolteacher, encourages her to go on. The drama unfolds as a compelling and resonant debate on aging, isolation, self-expression, and the tension between conformity and individuality.