Sunday Times 2024

Place is a moving love letter to South Africa, merging literature and landscape, and taking the reader on a breathtaking journey — into the heart of South Africa’s spectacular landscape and the inner worlds of its most celebrated authors.

‘Why can you not be friends anymore?’It was the story of his country, he supposed. Perhaps they could have been friends. Perhaps they were once. The reasons were complex, full of feeling, disappointment, resentment. And, of course, betrayal. This was the Middle East after all.Avi Dahan, a retired detective mourning his beloved wife in Tel Aviv, and Khalid Mansour, a Palestinian doctor confronting the precarious reality of living in Gaza City, are still reeling from the political fallout that jeopardised their delicate friendship. When a mysterious corpse scarred by history and forbidden love shows up in Khalid’s emergency room, he reaches out to Avi for help. Though the detective is the only one who might be able to assist, he is the last person on earth to agree …Did it really matter? In the face of chaos, was it important how she had died? That was the guidance he needed from Avi now. He needed to understand that question: did it matter anymore? Was it of any significance, how you died in a war?The stage is set for Andrew Brown’s unforgettable new novel, The Bitterness of Olives.

“‘Where are you from?’ I could ask her. ‘Have you had rain where you live? Are there soldiers there? Why did you come here?’ ‘Come with me,’ I tell her, instead.”Three Egg Dilemma is a haunting and beautiful book. This is the story of Ex (Example), who lives in a township on the outskirts of a Lesotho town. He stays in his dead parents’ house, decorated with all his mother’s things, where he subsists by renting out back rooms.He drinks – too much – at Mada’s down the road, and has two friends: Sticks, who sells eggs on the street, and Latrine, so called because of his meagre digestion.Although Ex used to have broad horizons, his life now is limited by the street he lives on. Once he had a meaningful job, he travelled, and had both money and hope. Life and Lesotho have been badly knocked: the country has suffered droughts and is periodically thrown into turmoil by violent soldiers or attacks by roving bandits such as the vicious Zuluboy.Early on, we are introduced to a recurring vision, or supernatural phenomenon, that haunts Ex — ‘Mota’s ghost’, a ghastly demonlike being, ghost or representation of death or fate. It first appears to presage the death of a friend, and later returns when death visits his town. The second important figure in the story is Phuleng/Pearl, an innocent young woman who arrives as a refugee when the soldiers are rampaging and stays in Ex’s house — in his mother’s room. Ex, though much older, predictably enough falls in love with Pearl, but she has other ambitions. She works in a hotel in town, and eventually we learn that she has been impregnated by a white guest. Before the end, Ex will frighten her away. She will eventually end up a refugee again, homeless and on the streets outside Ex’s house, after soldiers and gangs have torn the area apart.A visionary novel, Morojele has built worlds and characters that are unforgettable. It is set to become a classic work of South African fiction.Endorsements“Read it, read it again and run to the mountains.” — Bongani Madondo“Morojele is an extraordinary writer.” — Ivan Vladislavic“An exciting and inventive novel which brings an extraordinary dimension to the ordinary tale of life.” — Véronique Tadjo

"Out here, the past and the future lie over each other, like the strata of koppies. And in certain places the boundary between the two rubs clean."A century-old trunk has been dug up near the railway village of Sterfontein. Inside is the lost journal of Victorian author Elizabeth Tenant — and what appear to be the remains of a child.Michael, a university student recovering from a broken heart, is intrigued by what the journal describes: a scarlet curtain billowing above the desert, covering the entrance to another world. But things become even stranger when a line in the journal seems to be connected to Michael and his cosmologist mother, written a hundred years before their time.Michael travels to the old Karoo hotel where Elizabeth wrote her novel Mirage. Amid talk of omens in the sky, ancient prophecies and the end of the world, he tries to decipher the journal’s secrets. As time starts to dissolve in the mirages of the Karoo, it becomes more and more difficult to know what is real and what is not.And why can’t he shake the feeling that he’s been to the village before?A fast-paced metaphysical mystery that includes fascinating detail on Karoo landscape and botany, cosmology and astronomy. At its heart, Mirage is a story about loss and healing and how we use narrative to cope with pain.

Drawing on never-before-seen material, Steinberg reveals the fractures and stubborn bonds at the heart of a volatile and groundbreaking union, a very modern political marriage that played out on the world stage.One of the most celebrated political leaders of the twentieth century, Nelson Mandela has been written about by many biographers and historians. But in one crucial area, his life remains largely untold: his marriage to Winnie. During his years in prison, Nelson grew ever more in love with an idealised version of his wife, courting her in his letters as if they were young lovers frozen in time. But Winnie, every bit his political equal, found herself increasingly estranged from her jailed husband's politics. Behind his back, she was trying to orchestrate an armed seizure of power, a path he feared would lead to an endless civil war.Jonny Steinberg tells the tale of this unique marriage — its longings, its obsessions, its deceits — turning the course of South African history into a page-turning political biography. Winnie & Nelson is a modern epic in which trauma doesn't just affect the couple at its centre, but an entire nation. It is also a Shakespearean drama in which bonds of love and commitment mingle with timeless questions of revolution, such as whether to seek retribution or a negotiated peace. Told with power and tender emotional insight, Steinberg reveals how far these forever entwined leaders would go for one another, and also, where they drew the line. For in the end both knew theirs was not simply a marriage, but a contest to decide how apartheid should be fought.From one of South Africa's foremost nonfiction writers, a deeply researched, shattering new account of Nelson Mandela's relationship with Winnie Madikizela-Mandela.Endorsements"Gripping and profoundly moving" — Damon Galgut"Deft and operatic" — Observer

Welcome to Vivo, where the only cemetery is run by old Mateus and his dog, God. Mateus's eyes aren't so good these days, which is why he has been burying bodies in the wrong graves, and also why, while out walking with God, he trips over a young homeless girl. On a whim, Mateus decides to appoint the girl as his apprentice. Novo, who has been sleeping on the street with a dog-eared copy of The Savage Detectives as her pillow, is determined to reorganise the cemetery, but she will have to hurry: buried awry, divorced from their names, the ghosts of Vivo are accumulating, unable to proceed to the afterlife without knowing who they are. Also, someone, or something, is on the loose, killing people and closing in on the one person who can make things right.

You wouldn't know it was there, the unnumbered house behind the iron-grille gate, just below the craggy rocks of Northcliff Ridge. To the untrained eye the rambling property might seem neglected, with its tangle of trees and untamed indigenous bush.But there is purpose here, and a peaceful, subterranean focus on all that withers and dies. Five strangers — a model, a former nun, a couple in crisis, and an offender newly released from prison — have come here, to this place, to discover an end to life as they've known it. Placing their trust in their hosts, the Mortician and Mustafa, the five open their minds and bodies to an alternative experience.Not all of them will survive — or at least not in the way they imagined — but all of them will be shown the limits of their living. The Institute for Creative Dying is vivid and visceral, unique in its bold and imaginative exploration of mortality and the interconnectedness of all forms of being.

An account of nine tumultuous days, when the assassination of Nelson Mandela’s protégé by a white supremacist threatened to derail South Africa’s democratic transition and plunge the nation into civil war.Johannesburg, Easter weekend, 1993. Nelson Mandela had been released after twenty-seven years in prison and was in power-sharing talks with President F.W. de Klerk. After decades of resistance, the apartheid regime seemed poised to fall… until a white supremacist shot and killed Mandela’s popular heir apparent, Chris Hani, in a last desperate attempt to provoke civil war.Twenty-two-year-old rookie journalist Justice Malala was one of the first people at the crime scene. As he covered the growing chaos of the next nine days—the protests and police brutality, reprisal killings and calls for paramilitary units to get combat-ready—he was terrified the assassin’s plot might succeed.In The Plot to Save South Africa, Malala unspools this political history in the style of a thriller, alternating between the perspectives of participants across the political spectrum in a riveting, kaleidoscopic account of a country on the brink. Through vivid archival research and shocking original interviews, he digs into questions that were never fully answered in all the tumult at the time: How involved were far-right elements within the South African government in inciting—or even planning—the assassination? And as the time bomb ticked on, how did these political rivals work together with opponents whose ideology they’d long abhorred—despite provocation and their own failures, doubts, and fears—to keep their country from descending into civil war?Endorsements“Gripping and important.” — The Guardian“Masterfully.” — Foreign Affairs

In The Inheritors, award-winning writer Eve Fairbanks tells the stories of ordinary people confronting the question at the heart of post-1994 South Africa: do you mourn a 'miracle nation' that never came into being, fight to give it birth, or make something else from its ashes?Fairbanks follows political activist Dipuo, her born-free daughter Malaika, and Christo, one of the last Afrikaner men drafted to fight for the apartheid regime. All three must remake their lives while asking what they owe to their forebears and what history owes to them. They reveal unresolved rage, generational guilt, and the enduring hope many South Africans struggle even to speak aloud.Observing subtle truths about power and inheritance, Fairbanks explores how one lets go of the past, how historical debts should be paid, and how a person can live an honourable life in a society they no longer recognise.Endorsements'Lyrical, deep, chilling, and prescient, this is a book we will be talking about for years to come.' — Justice Malala, author and commentator.

World champion runner Caster Semenya offers an empowering account of her extraordinary life and career, and her trailblazing battle to compete on her own terms.Caster Semenya is one of the greatest athletes ever to run the 800 meters. Semenya went undefeated for almost four years, winning two Olympic gold medals and three World Athletics Championships, and set and broke numerous records.However, her life and career were devastated by accusations that Semenya—who was born with naturally elevated levels of testosterone—was not a woman and should not compete against other women. Required by the International Association of Athletics Federations to take hormone-altering drugs as a condition of competing in certain events, Semenya for years suffered side effects that she describes as devastating to her health. Her predicament surfaced a still-raging firestorm over our understanding of gender, of how gender plays out in sports, and our expectations of female athletes.The Race to be Myself tells the coming-of-age story of an iconic athlete—of Semenya’s dramatic journey from a gifted and self-trained novice to the pinnacle of her sport—and takes readers behind the scenes of her inspiring battle to run in the “body that God gave me.”