Sunday Times 2025

Professor. Pundit. Public nuisance. In his columns, books and on social media, Jonathan Jansen is prolific, and he likes to speak his mind about schools and universities, race, politics and our complex South African society.He has brought incisive analysis, compassion and a sense of humour to some of the most controversial issues in our country for many years. And now, in this memoir, Jansen goes back to his early growing up in a loving, fiercely evangelical family on the Cape Flats, being put on the road to purpose by an inspiring school teacher and becoming the first of his generation to go to university. Journey with Jansen as he finds his passion for teaching high school and becomes a leading academic and thinker amid great transformation in post-apartheid South Africa.His gift for storytelling and his interactions with people from different walks of life offer moving insights into the intricacies of South African society, insights that are filled with wisdom and leadership lessons. Jansen's patchwork of memories tells a bigger story than that of his own life. It's a tale of learning the value of 'breaking bread' with others, of finding mutual recognition in our different fears and faiths, our fumbles and fortitude, our hurts and our hopes.

In Morafe, Khumisho Moguerane has written a luminous exploration of two generations of the prominent Molema family. They were ‘border people’, who straddled what would become present-day South Africa and Botswana. Beginning in the 188os at the frontier of the new British territories of British Bechuanaland (North West and Northern Cape provinces) and the Bechuanaland Protectorate (Botswana), where the political boundary between these two territories is negligible and where skin colouring did not yet necessarily connect with a particular social or political status, nor did it yet really affect economic opportunity. Morafe ends in the 195os, where the political boundary matters profoundly, dividing two very different colonial dispensations of colonial racial ordering and classification, and two separate traditions of nationalist politics. With this landmark publication, Moguerane reveals that the ‘nation’ is less ‘out there’ in public institutions and political struggles, but ‘in here’, in the everyday drama of personal and ordinary lives.

Love and Fury traces a woman's fierce love and righteous rage, unravelling entanglements that are at once tender and traumatic. Renowned South African crime writer Margie Orford offers candid revelations, both political and personal, which have shaped her life and influenced her writing.Surviving marriage, divorce, depression, personal loss and sexual assault, Orford recounts memories of what she has experienced as a woman, a wife, a mother — and particularly as a writer.Love and Fury demonstrates the enduring, debilitating effects of hurt and harm, but at the same time it exemplifies the power of love, self-belief and self-reflection, ultimately offering a message of hope. This book is for every person who has experienced passion and wrath — and who looks beyond this to the light.

In 1986, seven young men were shot and killed by police in Gugulethu in Cape Town. The nation was told they were part of a 'terrorist' MK cell plotting an attack on a police unit. An inquest followed, then a dramatic trial in 1987 and a second inquest in 1989 that again exonerated the police. Finally, ten years later, Eugene de Kock's Vlakplaas unit was exposed at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for having planned and executed the cold-blooded killings. Yet their real agenda remained a mystery.In Hunting the Seven, Beverley Roos-Muller reveals her own decades-long connection to the case and her search for the truth of their deaths that has been shrouded in lies and mystery. Sifting through the evidence, and interviewing many of those involved, Roos-Muller reveals that it was Vlakplaas's only operation in the Western Cape and behind it lay a shocking secret.

Lebogang Seale has written a personal and poignant account of the impact of South Africa’s failing and flailing land reform policy on ordinary people desperate for restorative justice. One Hundred Years of Dispossession shows not only that land reform in South Africa is a criminal failure and a monumental disappointment, but that it is a betrayal that punishes affected communities whose quest for justice remains denied.

A cabin. A quarry. A crazy plan to run away and write a novel.This coming-of-age story with a twist: On the outskirts of Vivo, there is a cabin at the bottom of an abandoned quarry, barely visible from the roadside. With the help of his four best friends, Filo moves into this secluded place to write his first novel. He's convinced doing so will change his life and save him from a soul-destroying career as an accountant. The quarry, however, might not be as abandoned as it seems...What or who will Filo discover there? And what price will he pay for his art?Philosophical, erudite, and sexy, God's Pocket is a thought-provoking read that will haunt you long after you've finished the last page.

Claire is less cynical. ‘Fall in love, if you must. But do your research. And meet his people early on. They’ll give you a sense of who he is.’ Solid advice. And ultimately, this is how I found myself on a flight to Bloemfontein one Friday afternoon.An instant classic, the lies and betrayals of love and party politics are told in gorgeous prose with an ear for our time’s intimate and public language. The Comrade’s Wife follows a turbulent marriage between a rising politician and an academic, told through her life and lens.‘Tender, delightful, frightening. A testimony to Boswell’s inexhaustible vision.’ – Pumla Dineo Gqola, author of Female Fear Factory‘Wonderfully plotted, emotionally rich, clever, and full of intrigue… Find a quiet, comfortable corner and settle in because you won’t want to leave Anita’s superb company until she’s finished her story.’ – Nadia Davids, author of An Imperfect Blessing‘What a thrilling read! I could not put it down.’ – Terry-Ann Adams, author of White Chalk and Those Who Live in Cages‘Some politicians are as immoral at home as they are in the halls of government. The Comrade’s Wife is a wonderful account of the political made personal.’ – Rehana Rossouw, author of New Times and What Will People Say

Deidre is a victim of her family, her society, her history. That is how she sees herself, and so she feels free of all obligations, moral and practical — until the police take her back to her family home. In a Cape Town where water is rationed and must be collected from trucks each day, and where the consequences of apartheid and its ending are still evident, Deidre lives from day to day in squalor — largely self-created — borrowing, persuading, cadging her way from the water trucks to the bar, testing the tolerance and pity of everyone she knows. Then she is contacted by the police and taken by a respectful constable to the house where she grew up and where she lost her leg in a shattering explosion while still young. Faced with what is found there, she has to accept the truth of her past and of her older brother, her parents' golden boy. Then she must confront herself and her responsibility, and what it truly is to be a victim.

A haunting, a mystery and a long-forgotten love story intertwine in this tender, lyrical novel about a young girl’s search for belonging.Sana and Meena will never meet. The two women share little beyond Akbar Manzil, the sprawling mansion they call home. When Meena fell in love with the owner of the house, it was the grandest residence on South Africa’s east coast, near Durban. Eight decades later, when Sana follows in her footsteps, the house is crumbling, shabby and dark. This is a place where people come to forget. Or to be forgotten.Full of questions about her new home, Sana is drawn to the deserted east wing. Soon she begins to discover the tangled, troubling history of the house, dredging up old and terrible secrets that will change the lives of everyone at Akbar Manzil — living and dead.

A modern Gothic story set on the African continent, The Creation of Half-Broken People tells the tale of a nameless woman plagued by visions. She works for the Good Foundation and its museum, a place filled with artifacts from the family’s exploits in Africa, the Good family members all being descendants of Captain John Good, of King Solomon’s Mines fame.Our heroine is happy with her association with the Good family, until one day she comes across a group of people protesting outside the museum. Instigating the protesters is an ancient woman, who our heroine knows is not real. The nameless woman knows too that the secrets of her past have returned. After this encounter, she finds herself living first in an attic and then in a haunted castle, her life anything but normal as her own intangible inheritance unfolds through the women who inhabit her visions.With a knowing nod to classics of the Gothic genre, Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu weaves the threads of a complex colonial history into the present as she examines the collusion of colonialism, patriarchy, and capitalism in creating and normalizing a certain kind of womanhood.Stupendous African GothicEndorsementsWinner of Yale University’s Windham–Campbell Prize.