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If You Keep Digging
If You Keep Digging is a moving collection of short stories that is an essential addition to current and on-going discussions that affect the youth including those around migration, gender, sexuality and identity. The selection of stories highlights marginalised identities and looks at the daily lives of people who may otherwise be forgotten or dismissed. 'Monkeys' is a skilful commentary on domestic violence, toxic masculinity, patriarchy (and how it is racialised), power dynamics between white and black men and how children come to 'know' that they are white or black. 'Skinned', whose protagonist is a woman with albinism, is a powerful story about learning to accept that you deserve love when the world constantly tells you otherwise. In 'Fourteen' the author deftly demonstrates the ability to play with concepts of time and reality. It is a compelling story about potential and how one can feel unfulfilled despite having hopes and ambitions.
Joburg Noir
None
Miss Behave
Upon encountering historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s quote, ‘well-behaved women seldom make history’, Malebo Sephodi knew that she was tired of everyone else having a say on who and what she should be. Appropriating this quote, Malebo boldly renounces societal expectations placed on her as a black woman and shares her journey towards misbehavior. According to Malebo, it is the norm for a black woman to live in a society that prescribes what it means to be a well-behaved woman. Acting like this prescribed woman equals good behavior. But what happens when a black woman decides to live her own life and becomes her own form of who she wants to be? She is often seen as misbehaving. Miss-Behave challenges society’s deep-seated beliefs about what it means to be an obedient woman. In this book, Malebo tracks her journey on a path towards achieving total autonomy and self-determinism. Miss-Behave will challenge, rattle and occasionally cause you to scream ‘yassss, yassss, yassss’ at various intervals.
Born Freeloaders
Born on the cusp of democracy, the crew of young friends in Born Freeloaders navigates a life of drinking, wild parties and other recklessness. The siblings at the centre of the novel, Nthabiseng and Xolani, have been raised in an upper middle-class family with connections to the political elite. Nthabiseng is lauded by her peers as she whimsically goes through life, unable to form her own identity in a world that expects her to pick a side in the fractured classifications of race. Xolani, not having known his late father, longs for acceptance from an uncle who sees him and his generation as the bitter fruit borne of a freedom he and countless others fought for. As the story moves across multiple spaces in the nation’s capital over a weekend, Born Freeloaders captures a political and cultural moment in the city’s and South Africa’s history. Interwoven is an analogous tale of the country’s colonisation and the consequences that follow. And alongside the friends’ uneasy awareness of their privilege is a heightened sense of discomfort at their inability to change the world they were born into.
What Could Be Saved
Named a Best Book of 2021 by Real Simple “This brilliant portrayal of the lives of expats and their servants is also a suspenseful mystery with ever-darkening twists. For fans of A Little Life and The Goldfinch.” —People, Book of the Week Washington, DC, 2019: Laura Preston is a reclusive artist at odds with her older sister Bea as their elegant, formidable mother slowly slides into dementia. When a stranger contacts Laura claiming to be her brother who disappeared forty years earlier when the family lived in Bangkok, Laura ignores Bea’s warnings of a scam and flies to Thailand to see if it can be true. But meeting him in person leads to more questions than answers. Bangkok, 1972: Ge...
Welcome to Our Hillbrow
Welcome To Our Hillbrow is an exhilarating and disturbing ride through the chaotic and hyper-real zone of Hillbrow - microcosm of all that is contradictory, alluring and painful in the changing South African psyche. Everything is there: the shattered dreams of youth, sexuality and its unpredictable costs, AIDS, xenophobia, suicide, the omnipotent violence that often cuts short the promise of young people, and the Africanist understanding of the life continuum that does not end with death but flows on into an ancestral realm. Infused with the rhythms of the inner city pulsebeat, this courageous novel is compelling in its honesty and its broad vision, which links Hillbrow, rural Tiragalong and Oxford. It spills out the guts of Hillbrow-living with the same energy and intimate knowledge ,with which the Drum writers wrote Sophiatown into being.
The Eternal Audience of One
"Reminiscent of Zadie Smith and Michael Chabon, this "gorgeous, wildly funny and, above all, profoundly moving and humane" (Peter Orner, author of Am I Alone Here) coming-of-age tale follows a young man who is forced to flee his homeland of Rwanda during the Civil War and make sense of his reality"--
Crows of the Yellow Stream
Ikpeama is accused of stealing kola nuts, a crime against the gods of his people. If found guilty, he will suffer public disgrace, and lose his title and its privileges-but Odoro will suffer the greatest loss, if they only knew. Okudo returns to Odoro to ask questions and her ogbanje kindred whisk her off to a sacred pot that uncovers Odoro's generations-long secrets and reveals the coveted treasure guarded by the crows of the yellow stream. Scents of leopards, cunning of monkeys and bloody family feuds jostle for the soul of a people divided by their humanity in this epic fantasy. Odili Ujubuonu's fourth novel, Crows of the Yellow Stream, is a pulsating narrative about a people's combat with nature, self and other. "Here is classic knowledge, a novel of astonishing transformations . . . This is indeed an extraordinary novel." - Uzor Maxim Uzoatu, Author of God of Poetry "What a well-written and captivating book. Every once in a while I get a gem like this on Fiverr." - Samwrightwrites, Fiverr Consultant and Penguin Book Editor
An Unquiet Heart
From the bestselling author of Philomena comes a beautiful and heartbreaking tale about Sergei Yesenin, one of Russia’s most beloved poets. It vividly captures the extraordinary life of a man navigating love, loss and loneliness in the midst of the Russian Revolution. Sergei Yesenin is a young poet, formed by childhood abandonment, set on becoming the most famous poet in Russia in a time of war, revolution and terror. A sensitive soul in a senseless time, searching for meaning through poetry, fame and passionate affairs with both women and men – until a meeting with the beautiful actress Zinaida Raikh changes everything. ‘If thou art near, I’ll leave all behind, Renounce the world, t...
Obligations to the Wounded
In formally adventurous stories rooted in Zambian literary tradition, Obligations to the Wounded explores the expectations and burdens of womanhood in Zambia and for Zambian women living abroad. The collection converses with global social problems through the depiction of games, social media feuds, letters, and folklore to illustrate how girls and women manage religious expectation, migration, loss of language, death, intimate partner violence, and racial discrimination. Although the women and girls inhabiting these pages are separated geographically and by life stage, their shared burdens, culture, and homeland inextricably link them together in struggle and triumph.
