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Khadeejah is a hard-working and stubborn first-generation Indian woman who longs for her beloved homeland and often questions what she is doing on the tip of Africa. At 37, her daughter Summaya is struggling to reconcile her South African and Indian identities, while Summaya’s own daughter, eleven-year-old Aneesa, is a girl who has some difficult questions of her own. Is her mother lying to her about her father’s death? Why won’t she tell her what really happened? Gradually, the past merges with the present as the novel meanders through their lives, uncovering the secrets people keep, the words they swallow, and the emotions they elect to mute. For this family, faintly detectable through the sharp spicy aromas that find their way out of Khadeejah’s kitchen, the scent of tragedy is always threatening. Eventually, it will bring this family together. If not, it will tear them apart.
Magical' KANEEZ SURKA 'Funny, intense, thoughtful' FARAH BASHIR 'A rare, precious memoir' NATASHA BADHWAR When Shubnum Khan signed up for a photoshoot as part of an art project in college, she hadn’t imagined that the photographs would be plastered on billboards and advertisements all over the world. Two years on, her smiling face had sold condos in Mumbai and Florida, drawn subscribers to dating websites and convinced desperate customers of the supposed wonders of skin-lightening creams. This is but one of the many astounding misadventures she chronicles in How I Accidentally Became a Global Stock Photo and Other Strange and Wonderful Stories. In this part memoir, part travelogue, Shubnum takes you on unpredictable journeys far from her family home in South Africa. Whether it’s going off the grid in the Himalayas, getting pulled out of the ocean in Turkey or becoming a bride on a rooftop in Shanghai, she is quirky, moving and vulnerable in what she shares. All the while, she reflects on what it means to be a woman, especially a single Muslim woman, in the modern world. Her book is a helpful reminder that once ‘you step off the edge, anything can happen’.
A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITOR'S CHOICE "Rich and swoony...an ambitious delight, with rich characters and some exceptionally lovely writing...This is the start of a major career." -- The New York Times Book Review AN INDIE NEXT PICK A LIBRARY READS PICK “A dark and heady dream of a book” (Alix E. Harrow) about a ruined mansion by the sea, the djinn that haunts it, and a curious girl who unearths the tragedy that happened there a hundred years previous Akbar Manzil was once a grand estate off the coast of South Africa. Nearly a century later, it stands in ruins: an isolated boardinghouse for eclectic misfits, seeking solely to disappear into the mansion’s dark corridors. Except for...
"How to put back together the logs from an old oak tree? How to replace the long cold days with sunlight?" A sequence of meditative and minimalist poems, accompanied by ink drawings by Shubnum Khan.
"In South Africa, both 'crime' and 'safety' are loaded terms. Ziyanda Stuurman unpacks the complex and fraught history of policing, courts and prisons in South Africa. In her analysis of the problems nationally and in putting those problems in context with the rest of the world, she concludes that more resources won't necessarily lead to more safety. What then, will? Ziyanda unpacks this complex question deftly with a view of a better future for us all"--Provided by Publisher.
Orphan sisters chase monsters of urban legend in Bloemfontein. At a busy taxi rank, a woman kills a man with her shoe. A genomicist is accused of playing God when she creates a fatherless child. Intruders is a collection that explores how it feels not to belong. These are stories of unremarkable people thrust into extraordinary situations by events beyond their control. With a unique and memorable touch, Mohale Mashigo explores the everyday ills we live with and wrestle constantly, all the while allowing hidden energies to emerge and play out their unforeseen consequences. Intruders is speculative fiction at its best.
A collection of short stories, poems and activities that examines the world through the eyes of Muslim children.
'I would get out of the car at every shopping centre and want to ask the stranger walking by with their trolley: "Why are you still shopping? Someone I love has died."' – Dela Gwala Death is a fact of life, but the experience of grief is unique to each of us. This timely collection brings together a range of voices to offer refl ections on death and dying, from individual losses to large scale catastrophes. Karin Schimke revisits her troubled relationship with her late father, a Second World War survivor 'whose brain had been broken by violence'. Madeleine Fullard, the head of South Africa's Missing Persons Task Team, draws us into the search for activists who were 'disappeared' or went mi...
‘Beautiful, just beautiful. A story – a history really – elegiacally written and filled with everything that makes for an absorbing read: love, intrigue, conflict, mystique, and so much character. Shubnum Khan’s The Lost Love of Akbar Manzil invites us to examine South Africa’s issues of race, class and gender through a refreshingly unique lens. A revelation!’ – SIPHIWE GLORIA NDLOVU, critically acclaimed and award-winning author of The City of Kings Trilogy 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 ...
The Fatuous State of Severity is a fresh collection of short stories and illustrations that explores themes surrounding the experiences of a generation of young, urban South Africans coping with the tensions of social media, language insecurities and relationships of various kinds. Intense and provocative, this new edition of the book, which was first self-published in 2016, features six additional stories as well as an introductory essay on Phumlani Pikoli's publishing journey.