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Decima (ENG)
A mountain of flesh she is, this Decima, as she lies. She summons her strength to rise, all four feet on sand and shale. Puffs twirl and settle as her toes find their place. Three on each foot. Decima stands. In the veld of the Eastern Cape a writer imagines her: Decima – a magnificent black rhinoceros cow. Mother to Tandeka, herself plumped up with calf, Decima and her crash of rhinos await the birth of the new baby. Decima still recalls how she became an orphan many seasons ago, and tension mounts with the passing of each full moon. Conjuring up the life of Decima, is Eben. How do you write about this animal as a sentient being? he wants to find out. With the story of the rhino matriarch...
Trencherman
A powerful contemporary retelling of Heart of Darkness. One rainy night in Australia, Marlouw’s sister phones with the request that he fetch her son ‘from that bloody country’. And Marlouw, with his club foot and hardened spirit, believes it is his fate to carry out this instruction. Drenched in sweat after an ominous flight, his exodus takes him through a South Africa where poverty is rife, infrastructure has collapsed, AIDs has become widespread, and corruption reigns. He is told: ‘the whites who’ve stayed on, stay because they’re not able to leave’. Yet still he journeys deeper into the unknown — past the suffering masses alongside the road to the outer darkness of the rur...
My Beautiful Death
In a language rich with innuendo, textual references and streams-of-consciousness a South African boy in diaspora tells his story in the first person singular and takes the reader along up to his very last breath.
Green as the Sky Is Blue
Simon Avend, a South African living in Australia, can be unruly. He often sets out to exotic destinations, indulging his desires in places like Bali, Istanbul, Tokyo, and the Wild Coast. But along the way unsettling memories arise, of people and also places, especially the cattle farm in the Eastern Cape where he grew up. He approaches a therapist to help him make sense of his past, a process that leads them both on a journey of discovery. When circumstances bring Simon back to South Africa, he must confront the beauty and bitterness of his country of birth, and of the people to whom he is bound. Green as the Sky Is Blue is a bold, unflinching exploration of sexuality, intimacy, and the paradox that lies at the heart of our humanity.
The Alphabet of Birds
‘Cool and intelligent, unsettling and deeply felt, Naudé’s voice is something new in South African writing.’ – Damon Galgut From an ancient castle in Bavaria and a pre-War villa in Milan, to a winter landscape in Lesotho and the suburban streets of Pretoria, the stories in The Alphabet of Birds take an acute look at South Africans at home and abroad. In one story, a strange, cheerful Japanese man visits a young South African as he takes care of his dying mother; in another, a woman battles corrupt bureaucracy in the Eastern Cape. A man trails his lover through the underground dance clubs of Berlin, while in London a young banker moves through layers of decadence as a soul would through purgatory. Pulsating with passion, loss, and melancholia, S J Naudé’s collection The Alphabet of Birds is filled with music, art, architecture, myth, the search for origins and the shifing relationships between people.
Dinner With Mugabe
Acknowledgements; Preface; Timeline: A chronology of key events in Robert Mugabe’s life; Introduction; 1 Brother in the background; 2 Mummy and Uncle Bob; 3 The prisoner’s friend; 4 Comrades in arms; 5 A surprise agreement; 6 Tea with Lady Soames; 7 I told you so; 8 Britain’s diplomatic blunder; 9 A reluctant politician; 10 The faithful priest; 11 In the eyes of God’s deputies; 12 The man in the elegant suit; 13 Two of a kind; 14 Yesterday’s heroes; 15 As it was in the beginning; 16 The good, the bad, and the reality; Postscript; Selected bibliography; Index
Winnie and Wolf
Winnie and Wolf is the story of the remarkable relationship between Winifred Wagner and Adolf Hitler that took place during the years between the two world wars, as seen through the eyes of the secretary at the Wagner House in Bayreuth. Winifred, an English girl, was brought up in an orphanage and married at the age of eighteen to the son of Germany's most controversial genius. She is a passionate Germanophile, a Wagnerian dreamer, and a Teutonic patriot. In the debacle of the post-Versailles world, the Wagner family hopes for the coming of a Parsifal, a mystic idealist and redeemer. In 1923, they meet their Parsifal-a wild-eyed Viennese opera fanatic named Adolf Hitler. He has already made ...
Miracle Men
When Rassie Erasmus took over as coach of the Springboks in 2018, few thought they had a chance of winning the Rugby World Cup. The Boks had slipped to seventh in the world rankings and lost the faith of the rugby-loving public. Less than two years later, jubilant crowds lined the streets of South Africa's cities to welcome back the victorious team. Sportswriter Lloyd Burnard takes the reader on the thrilling journey of a team that went from no-hopers to world champions. He examines how exactly this turnaround was achieved. Interviews with players, coaches and support staff reveal how the principles of inclusion, openness and focus, as well as careful planning and superb physical conditionin...
Wolf, Wolf
Winner of the kykNET-Rapport Fiction Prize 2014 Shortlisted for the Sunday Times Fiction Award 2014 How should a man be? Mattie Duiker is trying very hard to live up to his dying father's wishes. He is putting aside childish things, starting his first business serving healthy take-away food to the workers of Cape Town. His Pa is proud. At the same time, Mattie is pulled toward an altogether different version of masculinity, in which oiled and toned bodies cavort for him at the click of a mouse. HIs porn addiction both threatens his relationship with his boyfriend, Jack, and imperils his inheritance. Pa's peacocking days as a swaggering businessman are done, but even as the cancer shrivels an...
Crossing Borders, Dissolving Boundaries
Borders separate but also connect self and other, and literary texts not only enact these bordering processes, but form part of such processes. This book gestures towards a borderless world, stepping, as it were, with thousand-mile boots from south to north (even across the Atlantic), from South Africa to Scandinavia. It also shows how literary texts model and remodel borders and bordering processes in rich and meaningful local contexts. The essays assembled here analyse the crossing and negotiation of borders and boundaries in works by Nadine Gordimer, Ingrid Winterbach, Deneys Reitz, Janet Suzman, Marlene van Niekerk, A.S. Byatt, Thomas Harris, Frank A. Jenssen, Eben Venter, Antjie Krog, and others under different signs or conceptual points of attraction. These signs include a spiritual turn, eventfulness, self-understanding, ethnic and linguistic mobilization, performative chronotopes, the grotesque, the carceral, the rhetorical, and the interstitial. Contributors: Ileana Dimitriu, Heilna du Plooy, John Gouws, Anne Heith, Lida Krüger, Susan Meyer, Adéle Nel, Ellen Rees, Johan Schimanski, Tony Ullyatt, Phil van Schalkwyk, Hein Viljoen.
