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Transformations
What does Playboy have to do with Nabokov’s infamous novel Lolita and his obsession with a butterfly? Why is Shrien Dewani looking so cheap? And what can Ovid’s Metamorphosis show us about contemporary South African society? Imraan Coovadia’s Transformations is a collection of short pieces in the tradition of the essayist: exciting, probing, intelligent and readable. The essays are on writing, politics and culture from a South African perspective. Written with his signature wit, and with subjects ranging from vuvuzelas to J M Coetzee, Tolstoy to Mbeki, Coovadia’s essays cast a wide net and, like literature and the country, never fail to surprise.
Green-Eyed Thieves
A mind-boggling tale of inspired crime and brotherly betrayel told by Firoze Peer - amateur philosopher and mystic, artful memoirist, green-eyed conspirator. Born into a crooked Johannesburg family and raised in the tradition of family solidarity and trust, Firoze and his identical twin brother, Ashraf, are employed from an early age in the family business. Firoze has the finer mind - he keeps the books and is encouraged to study mathematics by his uncle, Ten Percent Farouk. Ashraf has a talent for drawing which is, initially, put to use in the diamond trade in the creation of counterfeit certificates of rare artistry. From such beginnings, the brothers' lives progress through experiences th...
Tales of the Metric System
From a Natal boarding school in the seventies and Soviet spies in London in the eighties to the 1995 Rugby World Cup and intrigue in the Union Buildings, Tales of the Metric System shows how ten days spread across four decades send tidal waves through the lives of ordinary and extraordinary South Africans alike. An unforgettable cast of characters includes Ann, who is trying to protect her husband and son in 1970, and Victor, whose search for a missing document in 1973 will change his life forever. Rock guitarist Yash takes his boy to the beach on Boxing Day in 1979 to meet his revolutionary cousin, while Shanti, his granddaughter, loses her cellphone and falls in love twice on a lucky after...
The Institute for Taxi Poetry
Solly Greenfields, the first of the taxi poets, has been shot dead. At the Institute for Taxi Poetry, where they train young people to write poetry on the bodywork of Cape Town's taxis, Solly's protégé Adam Ravens tries to make sense of his death. Who killed Solly, and why is Adam's son acting so odd? In the world of Imraan Coovadia's new tragicomic novel taxi companies thrive in a single-party state. Taxi poets are admired, sliding-door men rule, professors and politicians strut and fret and connive in a society shaped by violence and ambition, love, and the unsettling power of the imagination.
The Poisoners
The Poisoners is a history of four devastating chapters in the making of the region, seen through the disturbing use of toxins and accusations of poisoning circulated by soldiers, spies, and politicians in Zimbabwe and South Africa. Imraan Coovadia’s fascinating new book exposes the secret use of poisons and diseases in the Rhodesian bush war and independent Zimbabwe, and the apparent connection to the 2001 anthrax attacks in the United States; the enquiry into the chemical and biological warfare programme in South Africa known as Project Coast, discovered through the arrest and failed prosecution of Dr Wouter Basson; the use of toxic compounds such as Virodene to treat patients at the hei...
A Spy in Time
Making sure the end of the world never happens again – that is Enver Eleven’s task. A spy for the Historical Agency, Enver is based in Johannesburg, the only city to survive – thanks to its mining tunnels – when a supernova hit. In Enver’s Joburg time-travelling agents jump between the past and future, searching for an elusive enemy plotting against the Agency. Enver’s mission starts off on shaky ground: when his mentor Shanumi Six disappears, Enver must prove that he is no double agent, an allegation as frightening as a white skin in a world where it has become vanishingly rare. But if you could go back and change the past, would the future turn out the way you want it to? Imraan Coovadia’s dazzlingly original A Spy in Time is an extraordinary tale for extraordinary times.
High Low In-Between
There was nothing in the room to surprise her. She could understand exactly what had happened. She had known about this in the morning. She had known about it the day before, the month before, and in fact since the moment of her birth. The violent death of her biologist husband forces Nafisa into a world of illegal organ transplants, bribery, and scientific and political controversy. With an acute sense of the disruptions of contemporary South Africa, and its keen feeling for love and loss, High Low In-between reveals Nafisa’s relationships with the people close to her and the anarchic currents of life and death she discovers.
The Wedding
Set in India and South Africa, The Wedding joins Ismet Nassin, a clerk of modest prospects from Bombay, and Khateja, a village beauty he marries on the very day he spies her from the window of his train. Matrimony happens fast, love lags behind. Khateja is willful, difficult, and misanthropic—in short, highly desirable. Ismet is in for the battle of his life. Based upon the story of his grandparents and his own upbringing in Durban, South Africa, Imraan Coovadia has written a brilliantly funny and tender first novel—an alternately poignant and hilarious story about the choices we make and the homes that we build. The Wedding is a witty and wonderful subcontinental The Taming of the Shrew.
Revolution and Non-Violence in Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Mandela
The dangers of political violence and the possibilities of non-violence were the central themes of three lives which changed the twentieth century--Leo Tolstoy, writer and aristocrat who turned against his class, Mohandas Gandhi who corresponded with Tolstoy and considered him the most important person of the time, and Nelson Mandela, prisoner and statesman, who read War and Peace on Robben Island and who, despite having led a campaign of sabotage, saw himself as a successor to Gandhi. Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Mandela tried to create transformed societies to replace the dying forms of colony and empire. They found the inequalities of Russia, India, and South Africa intolerable yet they questione...
The African Novel of Ideas
"This study focuses on the role of the philosophical novel--a genre that favors abstract concepts, or 'thinking about thinking,' over style, plot, or character development--and the role of philosophy more broadly in the intellectual life of the African continent"
