In 2022 Elon Musk - one of the richest and best-known people on earth - made headlines worldwide with his bid to buy Twitter, and he is often in the news for his entrepreneurial exploits and his controversial tweets. Who is this boundary-pushing billionaire with grand plans of inhabiting Mars, and what lies at the heart of his vision? Why is he so utterly unafraid of risk?

As an awkward Pretoria schoolboy who loved comics and science fiction, Musk's early years and singular family background were crucial in forming his stellar ambitions. Journalist and author Michael Vlismas, who attended the same high school as Musk, knows well the environment that shaped him and offers new insights into Musk's development, including his troubled relationship with his father.

Tracing his remarkable life, from his South African childhood to his move to Canada at 17 and then to the US - where Musk made millions out of PayPal and built Tesla and SpaceX into two of the world's most famous companies - this is the revealing new story of a man driven to preserve the optimism he sees in humanity and find a future for humans 'out there among the stars'.

Feeling an exile in the country of his birth, the talented journalist and leading black intellectual Bloke Modisane left South Africa in 1959. It was shortly after the apartheid government had bulldozed Sophiatown, the township of his childhood. His biting indictment of apartheid, Blame Me on History, was published in 1963 – and banned shortly afterwards.

Modisane offers a harrowing account of the degradation and oppression faced daily by black South Africans. His penetrating observations and insightful commentary paint a vivid picture of what it meant to be black in apartheid South Africa. At the same time, his evocative writing transports the reader back to a time when Sophiatown still teemed with life.

This 60th-anniversary edition of Modisane’s autobiography serves as an example of passionate resistance to the scourge of racial discrimination in our country, and is a reminder not to forget our recent past.

Wat dryf ’n beeldskone jong ma van drie daartoe om haar man wreed te laat vermoor? Waarom wou Suretha Brits só graag van haar Leon ontslae raak?

Danksy inligting uit die binnekring van vriende, familie en mense ná aan die polisie-ondersoek, sit die joernalis Charné Kemp die stukkies van die legkaart bymekaar en vertel die volle verhaal van die opspraakwekkende huurmoord op die geliefde Pofadder-hotelbaas.

’n Boeiende ware misdaadverhaal wat draai om geld, diamante, Krugerrande, seks en verraad.

Sixteen-year-old Engela flees to Bloemfontein because the leader of the Satanic Group 13 wishes to kill her. Her path crosses with Pieter, a friend of her brother’s, who turns her over to the owner of a brothel in return for money he owes him.

After a desperate and impoverished childhood Engela, as a rebellious teenager, becomes mixed up with Satanism, alcohol and drugs and is eventually kept as a sex slave. Her only wish is to escape, but how? Every night the club’s doors are shuttered. Her final shot at freedom is the young student Jacques who works in the club’s reception area. But then he also disappears from the scene following a mysterious accident in the Drakensberg . . .

In the second part of the book Elanie shares with the reader her awful experiences. She relates how she learned to cope with her feelings of despair, loneliness, pain and humiliation from a Christian perspective. She reaches out to other former victims of sex trafficking and encourages them to open their hearts in order to achieve emotional healing. She talks about the power of forgiveness and acceptance, and also offers essential practical advice for parents and their children.

Vusi Mavimbela is one of South Africa’s foremost political adventurers and wanderers. His memoir Time is Not the Measure provides penetrating pen portraits of many South African and African political actors and a galaxy of senior ANC exiles. He illuminates the personalities of many influential people in South Africa’s early democratic governments.

But the heart of Mavimbela’s narrative lies in his unique experience of working as a top administrator and counsellor in the offices of both Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma. He describes the conflict between those two flawed principals and captures the drama of their struggle and its destructive fallout for the new South African state.

Mavimbela offers a potent warning: loyalty and long service to a political party is no guarantee of wise and effective leadership.

Join Ivan Johnson in this memoir of an identity crisis as a high-spirited boy from a close-knit family on the Cape Flats becomes a man amid the turmoil of The Struggle.

Joining the lily white advertising industry, he ghosts from group to group, fitting in everywhere but belonging nowhere.

Told with flair and irreverence, Ivan’s sharp eye and zest for life gives both food for thought and great entertainment.

Maggie is a remarkable firsthand account of a teenage girl’s experiences during the AngloBoer War.

Margaretha (Maggie) Jooste was only 13 years old when the AngloBoer War broke out and her life was irrevocably changed. After months of house arrest in their Heidelberg (Transvaal) home, she, her mother and younger siblings were sent away to concentration camps in Natal. There they experienced hunger, deprivation and loss, but also surprising acts of kindness from British guards.

This very personal account is a story of hardships, but also one of humanity and friendships over enemy lines. A golden threat is the close bond between the Jooste family and the Englishspeaking Russells who lived as neighbours and friends before the war broke out. While the British soldiers and Boer commandos fought the war, the Russells secretly provided food to the Joostes to help them survive, and supported them after the war.

A poignant and deeply moving, but also heartbreaking, true story.

“I’m a very level-headed person,” Melanie Verwoerd told the gynaecological oncologist. “However, I feel like my dogs during a thunderstorm. I’m desperately trying to find somewhere to hide, but everywhere I go, it is still there.”

A week earlier, another gynaecologist had paused mid-sentence during a routine ultrasound examination. Something big was wrong. Blood tests showed elevated tumour markers and scans revealed a huge ovarian tumour with at least a 70% chance of being cancerous. A few days later a radical hysterectomy was performed. As the terror grew, the only way for her to make sense of what was happening was to write. This book is the brutally honest reflection of the year that followed the operation.

The physical recovery was painful, messy and took much longer than expected. However, even more surprising was the deeper, soul-searching questions that the procedure brought to the fore. The physical crisis triggered an intense journey of self-reflection and discovery. It required courageous investigations of the darkest corners of her psyche and forced her to face many of the fears that had comfortably lived there for decades. It also threw a spotlight on the relationship she – and many women – have with their bodies, sex, money as well as the role of intergenerational trauma. In the process, Melanie also had to come to terms with the rage, pain and grief of the hysterectomy specifically and many other losses in general, whilst investigating what she wanted to do with the second part of her life.

Although this book was triggered by a hysterectomy, it is not intended just for those who have had or are going to have a similar experience. It is also meant for every woman who comes to a crossroad and has to reassess her life.

And although it is brutally honest, it is also hope giving, and insists that women’s voices be heard.

What was supposed to be a short business trip to Equatorial Guinea turned into a journey to the depths of hell.

Black Beach, located on Bioko island off the mainland of Equatorial Guinea, is one of the world’s most feared prisons, notorious for its brutality and inhumane conditions.

In 2013, South African businessman Daniel Janse van Rensburg set off to the West African country to finalise a legitimate airline contract with a local politician. Within days, Daniel was arrested by the local Rapid Intervention Force and detained without trial in the island’s infamous ‘Guantanamo’ cells, and was later taken to Black Beach. This is his remarkable story of survival over nearly two years, made possible by his unwavering faith and the humanity of a few fellow inmates.

In this thrilling first-person narrative, Daniel relives his ordeal, describing the harrowing conditions in the prison, his extraordinary experiences there, and his ceaseless hope to return to South Africa and be reunited with his family. A story of courage in the face of overwhelming adversity, Black Beach demonstrates the strength of the human spirit and the toll injustice takes on ordinary people who fall foul of the powerful and corrupt.

There has been a lot of furore in the United States about Critical Race Theory (CRT). Opponents to it claim that it has saturated society at different levels, including the alleged indoctrination of school children and the poisoning of the media and public life. The assertion is that it is divisive and racist towards white people. It is sometimes referred to derisively in the shorthand ‘woke’. This panic has now reached our shores. Critical whiteness studies is an offshoot of CRT that Thandiwe Ntshinga believes is desperately needed in South Africa.

She pokes holes in the belief that leaving whiteness undisturbed for analysis creates justice and normalcy. Instead, she says perpetually studying every other identity can only create the assumption that they are perpetually the problem. By design.

The title of this book comes from one of the first comments she received on Tiktok when discussing her findings and research.

Major-General Jeremy Vearey, ex-MK cadre, is deputy provincial commissioner of the Western Cape SAPS. He starts his 'police memoir' with the old apartheid police and ex-freedom fighters meeting for the first time.

Action ranges from the secretive Operation Saladin to anti-gang policing with the 'skollie patrollie'. Underworld figures and gangsters loom large, as does the constant fear of death. Painting a vivid portrait of policing, politics and criminality in the Western Cape, this is also an intimate account of what it means to reach the highest ranks of policing, having been a revolutionary.

The ‘dark stream’ is the price that the author has paid for following his calling.

Khamr: The Makings Of A Waterslams is a true story that maps the author’s experience of living with an alcoholic father and the direct conflict of having to perform a Muslim life that taught him that nearly everything he called home was forbidden.

A detailed account from his childhood to early adulthood, Jamil F. Khan lays bare the experience of living in a so-called middle-class Coloured home in a neighbourhood called Bernadino Heights in Kraaifontein, a suburb to the north of Cape Town. His memories are overwhelmed by the constant discord that was created by the chaos and dysfunction of his alcoholic home and a co-dependent relationship with his mother, while trying to manage the daily routine of his parents keeping up appearances and him maintaining scholastic excellence.

Khan’s memories are clear and detailed, which in turn is complemented by his scholarly thinking and analysis of those memories. He interrogates the intersections of Islam, Colouredness and the hypocrisy of respectability as well as the effect perceived class status has on these social realities in simple yet incisive language, giving the reader more than just a memoir of pain and suffering.

Khan says about his debut book: "This is not a story for the romanticisation of pain and perseverance, although it tells of overcoming many difficulties. It is a critique of secret violence in faith communities and families, and the hypocrisy that has damaged so many people still looking for a place and way to voice their trauma. This is a critique of the value placed on ritual and culture at the expense of human life and well-being, and the far-reaching consequences of systems of oppression dressed up as tradition."

In this riveting new book, John Laband, pre-eminent historian of the Zulu Kingdom, tackles some of the questions that swirl around the assassination in 1828 of King Shaka, the celebrated founder of the Zulu Kingdom and war leader of legendary brilliance: Why did prominent members of the royal house conspire to kill him? Just how significant a part did the white hunter-traders settled at Port Natal play in their royal patron's downfall? Why were Shaka's relations with the British Cape Colony key to his survival? And why did the powerful army he had created acquiesce so tamely in the usurpation of the throne by Dingane, his half-brother and assassin?

In his search for answers Laband turns to the Zulu voice heard through recorded oral testimony and praise-poems, and to the written accounts and reminiscences of the Port Natal trader-hunters and the despatches of Cape officials. In the course of probing and assessing this evidence the author vividly brings the early Zulu kingdom and its inhabitants to life. He throws light on this elusive character of and his own unpredictable intentions, while illuminating the fears and ambitions of those attempting to prosper and survive in his hazardous kingdom: a kingdom that nevertheless endured in all its essential characteristics, particularly militarily, until its destruction fifty one years later in 1879 by the British; and whose fate, legend has it, Shaka predicted with his dying breath.

In 2018, Alastair McAlpine, a palliative paediatrician in Cape Town, decided to share some inspiring thoughts from the children in his care. He posted: ‘I asked some of my terminal paediatric palliative care patients what they had enjoyed in life, and what gave it meaning. Kids can be so wise, y’know. Here are some of the responses.’

Their simple yet profound answers went viral, found their way into homes across the world and touched the hearts of millions. Yet it was never McAlpine’s plan to find himself in this position. Challenged from all sides by crippling addiction, a brutal internship and a deadly HIV pandemic, McAlpine’s journey was very nearly derailed.

Prescription: Ice Cream is his engaging memoir about the highs and lows of working as a medical doctor in South Africa and how, with a little help from metal music and ice cream, he was able to struggle on, find meaning in the chaos and inspire others.

Volgens PG du Plessis het Pirow Bekker ʼn “benydenswaardig-heldere pen”. In hierdie, Bekker se 23ste publikasie sedert 1965, word die leser meegevoer deur sy herinneringsreise na plekke van herkoms en vroeëre verblyf, sowel as die verlede in sy eie gedagtes. Daar is juwele in hierdie teks.

’n Belangrike bydrae van die boek is die beligting van demensie en Alzheimer. Beurtelinge se stralende eerlikheid maak dit ʼn waardevolle werk.

On one hand, Hunting The Dragon tells the story of the failure after failure of a brilliant but often frustrated South African entrepreneur who finally went on to hit the big time with a billion-rand company. But it is more than a memoir.

For three decades, Iain Buchan battled his competitors, his bosses, his partners and his own worst instincts as he launched one exciting but ultimately doomed business venture after another. Life was a roller coaster. The highs were addictive, the lows suicidal. With each failure, Iain’s confidence took a knock, until the doubts consumed him. Why couldn’t he crack it? Why was he constantly fighting the world? What was the fear that drove him, though never to sustainable success?

It was only after a profound personal transformation in his mid-40s that Iain could begin to work his way towards real and long-lasting success, in business and in life. Together with his three children and inspirational team, Iain has put personal growth at the front and centre of their business, The Unlimited. In doing so, they have developed a leadership system that drives one of the most successful and inspiring sales forces in the country, an empowered collection of young South Africans whose sales ability generates previously unimaginable revenues.

Hunting The Dragon isn’t just a memoir or business book. It is a truly eye-opening account of what it means to struggle and transform to achieve real success in life through leadership.

After an exceptionally wild Mother’s Day where she danced like there was no tomorrow, picked a fight with a stranger and collided with the floor, Johannesburg scriptwriter and author Pamela Power is forced to take a hard look at her drinking habits. She realises that although she does not need to find an AA group immediately, she might be a serial binge drinker and needs to take back control.

In this honest yet humorous account of her year of not getting sh*tfaced, Pamela examines her long, complicated relationship with alcohol. She is shocked to realise just how much of a crutch alcohol has been for her. There is always a bottle of wine or Prosecco around to her to help her manage the many demands of life as a freelancer and as a parent.

Pamela starts her journey to sobriety at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic as her family faces financial troubles, and life in the suburban Parks of Johannesburg isn’t so blissful anymore. Through her, we experience all the frustration, irritation and surprising benefits of going dry. In dealing with her dependence on alcohol, Pamela also confronts her troubled relationship with her parents.

While many other sober curious books portray sobriety as the only answer, Pamela has found a sweet spot between total sobriety and binge drinking: moderation.

Reynardt Hugo speel Dr Tertius Jonker in Binnelanders en was van 2011 tot 2019 lid van die Afrikaanse popgroep ADAM. Tog, agter al sy sukses, sangtoere, toekennings en die vele lofbetuigings is daar ’n diep gewonde en verlore siel. Nes duisende ander mans, het Reynardt jare lank gestoei om sy verwondheid met drank, dagga, vroue en pornografie te verdoesel. Sy oorlog was ’n soeke na betekenis en aanvaarding.

Soldaat vertel van ’n klein seuntjie en die verwarrende wêreld waarin hy grootgeword het. Hy praat eerlik en opreg oor die impak wat sy ouers se egskeiding op hom gehad het, en die invloed van drankmisbruik in hulle huis, en hoe hy dit alles as jong seun ervaar het en daarvan moes sin maak. Hy praat openlik oor sy swakheid vir vroue en die gevolge van sy dade.

Vandag is Reynardt Hugo ’n suksesvolle jong man wat ’n groot impak maak. Die pad was lank en rof en hy moes vele uitdagings oorkom, maar vandag is sy lewe ’n ware getuienis van wat God kan doen met iemand wat op moedverloor se vlakte sit, en hoe God ’n storie van verwoesting in ’n storie van hoop kan verander.

Reynardt se verhaal is boeiend. Dit bevat al die elemente van tragedie, intrige, neerlaag en oorwinning, maar ook die heel belangrikste bestanddeel: die krag van die evangelie van Jesus Christus.

A hybrid narrative, blending memoir with social commentary and political analysis.

Always in search of "home", the book tracks Ismail Lagardien's vast experiences of a deeply lived life, always against a backdrop of "unbelonging" - first as a reporter in the turbulent 80s, to studying economics at the LSE, then achieving a doctorate at the University of Wales, to working as a speechwriter at the World Bank in Washington.

A unique and brilliant read.

"South Africa's most notorious female serial killer since Daisy de Melker".

In 2021, South Africa was introduced to notorious serial killer, Rosemary Ndlovu. Rosemary worked as a police sergeant in Tembisa, Ekurhuleni. Despite taking an oath to serve and protect, in court it emerged that she had arranged the murders of her lover and at least five members of her family. For some murders she hired hitmen, others she carried out herself.

Regarded as our nation's most significant female serial killer since Daisy de Melker, Rosemary killed for money.

Mathews Phosa has been an eyewitness to the changing strands of political power in South Africa.

He was involved in the Black Consciousness Movement, the UDF and the ANC, before fleeing into exile in 1985 and becoming an Umkhonto we Sizwe commander in Mozambique. A lawyer by training, he was one of the first ANC members to return to South Africa to prepare the way for negotiations.

He was premier of Mpumalanga during the presidency of Nelson Mandela, with whom he had a strong relationship. Under Thabo Mbeki, whom he had known in exile, Phosa was pushed to the sidelines, with false accusations that he was involved in a ‘plot’ to overthrow Mbeki. Phosa had served under Jacob Zuma as an MK field commander in Mozambique, and he became treasurer general of the ANC when Zuma became its president at Polokwane. But Phosa later became a vocal critic of Zuma, and they didn’t speak for years, until the night before Zuma’s resignation. Phosa and Cyril Ramaphosa studied law together at the University of the North in the 1970s, and Phosa played a key role in advising him over the Phala Phala report that threatened to end his presidency.

Frank and honest, Witness to Power is a gripping story of a courageous life, and an insider’s account of South Africa’s ruling party and its leaders.

After matriculating from a top Jewish school, Nikki Munitz finds herself in the clutches of a heroin addiction. She's sent to a remote rehab, run by a pastor who brandishes a tattoo of Satan. There she meets the handsome son of a wealthy Afrikaans family. Lured by the illusion of her ‘happy-ever-after’ she marries him. But the facade soon crumbles.

Money is in short supply. Nikki takes on a job at a reputable law firm. Encrypted passwords are entrusted to her. She begins to siphon small, undetectable amounts from trust funds of loyal clients. The amounts increase. Caught red-handed, she's fired. By the time the law catches up with her, Nikki is clean and sober. On the advice of her lawyer who reassures her she will never go to jail, she pleads guilty to all 37 counts of fraud. After a gruelling 2-year court battle, she's found guilty.

Fraud is a powerful memoir about a young woman who is forced to face her life of deceit in a prison cell where she ultimately finds her freedom to fly.

With M-Net, Koos Bekker convinced the business world he had the magic touch. But it was only the start of an entrepreneurial journey that would bring him immense wealth.

Bekker swept in at Naspers, transforming an Afrikaans printer into a global technology giant, earning investors trillions and himself a good few billion. But how? What were the methods employed by this boerseun from Heidelberg?

Financial journalist TJ Strydom distils it down to 15 steps, each calculated and effective, sketching out the winning ways of the elusive media mogul. Bekker often gets the credit for the investment in China’s Tencent, a single punt that rivals South Africa’s entire mining sector in the wealth it created this century. But should he be the one lauded for this achievement?

It has been said that the best-known South Africans outside South Africa is Nelson Mandela and Jan Smuts. Smuts is regarded as the most prominent Afrikaner ever and one of the most influential world leaders of his time. So much and so many books have been written about him, but because of his complex personality, some aspects of his life remains a mystery.

In this photobook his life is captured chronologically in photographs, some never published before. Foreword by Fransjohan Pretorius and background information by Richard Steyn.

Herman Lategan word wyd gerespekteer as joernalis, en is beide berug én beroemd vir sy uitgesprokenheid en kwinkslae oor alles onder die son. In Hoerkind vertel hy sy lewensverhaal uit die hart uit, sonder doekies omdraai. Hy is een warm Februarienag in 1964 in ’n losieshuis in Kaapstad verwek – buite die eg. Van jongs af het hy soos ’n weggooimens gevoel, want hy is deur grootmense wat die lewe op onvaste voet betree het, van die een stel hande na die ander aangegee.

Op 13 beland hy in die kloue van ’n geslepe pedofiel, ’n bekende Afrikaanse koerantman in daardie jare. Pas na sy 18de verjaarsdag, wanneer sy molesteerder met hom klaar is, word Herman sonder seremonie voor die deur van sy vervreemde alkoholis-pa afgelaai. In sy tienerjare bevriend hy Afrikaanse digters soos Sheila Cussons, Ina Rousseau, Barend J. Toerien en Casper Schmidt. Ná skool doen hy sy diensplig, maar word oneervol ontslaan en kom hy in New York aan, waar hy vir Andy Warhol op straat agtervolg en met ’n “smorgasbord van eendagsvlinders” kattemaai.

Terug in Suid-Afrika maak Herman opgang as joernalis wat na die wydste hoeke van die wêreld reis. As volwassene voer hy ’n stryd met drank en dwelms en is ’n ruk lank haweloos. En vir menige werkgewer word hy die nagmerrie wat hulle die ergste vrees.

Hoerkind is ’n aangrypende relaas oor verlies én oorwinning wat jou sal laat lag, en jou hart ’n paar keer breek. Jy sal jou kop skud oor die wreedheid van ’n wêreld waar mense aan mekaar uitgelewer is, maar jy sal verwonderd staan oor die omvang van goedheid, juis omdat mense op mekaar aangewese is.