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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.
Third Reel
Twenty-two-year-old Etienne is studying film in London, having fled conscription in his native South Africa. It is 1986, the time of Thatcher, anti-apartheid campaigns and Aids, but also of postmodern art, post-punk rock, and Royal Vauxhall Tavern. Adrift in a city cast in shadow, he falls in love with a German artist while living in derelict artists' communes.When Etienne finds the first of three reels of a German film from the 1930s, he begins searching for the missing reels, a project that turns into an obsession when his lover disappears in Berlin. It is while navigating this city divided by the Wall that Etienne gradually pieces together the history of a small group of Jewish film makers in Nazi Germany.It is a desperate quest amid complications that pull him back to the present and to South Africa. However, his search for the missing film continues.Ambitious and cosmopolitan, the material of S. J. Naud�'s The Third Reel is as disparate as the cities in which the book is set. Architecture, cinematography, sex, music, illness, loss and love all collide in this exquisitely wrought, deeply affecting novel.
Mad Honey
From South Africa to Iceland, rural Belgium and the Alps, the stories in Mad Honey radiate out to encompass the globe. In Cape Town, a couple raise their son in leafy suburbia, while their cleaner’s child must face the inequities of their country head on. Amid Reykjavik’s frozen landscape, a woman takes mad honey with the man who has left her for another, and spends a chilling night with a violent Russian and his companion. And in New England two lovers face the cruelty of a host who lacks all humanity, while a mother takes pity on a street child she finds on a platform at Park Station. Crowning this collection is a story cycle featuring a young Namibian and his Japanese friend, who spend a claustrophobic night in a chateau with a dark pool of glowing eels – this after being pulled into a tragedy on the ski slopes of Italy. Following on from his multi award-winning first collection, published in English as The Alphabet of Birds, SJ Naudé’s second collection of short stories disturbs, surprises and enthrals.
Moffie
Nicholas van der Swart has always known he is different. Unable to live up to the expectations his family, his heritage and his culture have of him, he grows increasingly diffident and introverted. When, at the age of 19, he is conscripted into the South African army, he enters a world that is utterly at odds with his every sensibility. Here, he will face the scorn and violence of his tormenters, but will also find the strength to survive. Although the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa has gone a long way toward exposing and exorcising some of the atrocities committed in the name of Apartheid, very little has been revealed about the adversities faced by gays under the regime. Set in “Ward 22” during the Angola Bush War that raged from 1966 to 1989 in South-west Africa, Moffie transports the reader into the world of a young gay conscript with evocative realism. At turns heart wrenching and humorous, told with great sensitivity and infused with hope, Moffie is a long overdue account of a vital subject, place and time.
Government Gazette
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Weeping Waters
First in the series starring a South African police detective: “[A] picturesque backdrop, cast of authentic characters, and knotty story line” (Publishers Weekly). Shortlisted for the International Dagger Award and Winner of the University of Johannesburg Debut Prize Insp. Albertus Markus Beeslaar is a traumatized cop who has abandoned tough city policing and a broken relationship in Johannesburg for a backwater post on the edge of the Kalahari Desert. But his dream of rural peace is soon shattered by the repeated attacks of a brutally efficient crime syndicate, as he struggles to train and connect with rookie local cops Ghaap and Pyl, who resent his brusqueness and his old-school ways. ...
Lacuna
The traumatized central character of J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace is provocatively reimagined in this “surprising, subtle, and deeply challenging” novel (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). Two years ago, Lucy Lurie was the victim of an act of sexual violence that devastated her life. Afterwards, she becomes obsessed with the author John Coetzee, whose acclaimed novel turned her brutal assault into a literary metaphor. Withdrawn and fearful of crowds, Lucy nonetheless makes occasional forays into the world of men in her search for Coetzee himself. She means to confront him. The Lucy in his novel, Disgrace, is passive and almost entirely lacking agency. Lucy means to right the record, for she is the lacuna that Coetzee left in his novel—the missing piece of the puzzle. Lucy plans to put herself back in the story, to assert her agency and identity. For Lucy Lurie will be no man’s lacuna. Lacuna is both a powerful feminist reply to the book considered to be Coetzee’s masterwork, and the moving story of one woman’s attempt to reclaim her identity after trauma. Winner of the Sala Novel Award Winner of the Humanities and Social Sciences Award for the Novel
The Awakening of Intelligence
This comprehensive record of Krishnamurti's teachings is an excellent, wide-ranging introduction to the great philosopher's thought. With among others, Jacob Needleman, Alain Naude, and Swami Venkatasananda, Krishnamurti examines such issues as the role of the teacher and tradition; the need for awareness of 'cosmic consciousness; the problem of good and evil; and traditional Vedanta methods of help for different levels of seekers.
Two Trees Make a Forest
This "stunning journey through a country that is home to exhilarating natural wonders, and a scarring colonial past . . . makes breathtakingly clear the connection between nature and humanity, and offers a singular portrait of the complexities inherent to our ideas of identity, family, and love" (Refinery29). A chance discovery of letters written by her immigrant grandfather leads Jessica J. Lee to her ancestral homeland, Taiwan. There, she seeks his story while growing closer to the land he knew. Lee hikes mountains home to Formosan flamecrests, birds found nowhere else on earth, and swims in a lake of drowned cedars. She bikes flatlands where spoonbills alight by fish farms, and learns abo...
