Op skool was ôs gelee met patrone om cursive te skryf. En gelee tel sône om ôs vinges te gebryk. En kyk nou vi ôs, ôs met ôs nommes en somme wat meer veloorit as wat ôs ooit kan tel, ôs met ôs mooi handskrifte en nieman om voo te skryfie.

In haar verrykende memoir skryf Charmaine Africa op narratiewe wyse, en in Kaaps, oor haar grootwordjare in Bishop Lavis. Haar lewensverhaal, wat verras met humoristiese oomblikke, sentreer op die alledaagse bestaan van haar familie vanaf die 1960’s: haar ma, Amma, wat spartel om haar werk en gesin bymekaar te hou; haar alkoholis-pa; haar susters wat ook ’n verbete stryd in hul eie huwelike voer; haar broers wat uiteindelik voor die drankduiwel swig; en haar eie ontwikkeling as kind tot ’n jong vrou wat ’n onvermydelike siklus probeer veg.

Amma gee ’n stem aan die oorlewingstryd op die Kaapse Vlakte en ’n eerlike blik op die kringloop van kru armoede. Die vertelling is onopgesmuk, hartverskeurend en meesterlik.

This story of a middle-class white South African family unfolds between the years 1939 and 1964 - a transformative period in South Africa’s political landscape.

It is told through the eyes and experiences of the younger son and his rite of passage into a country of racial segregation that gradually opens his eyes to the many injustices imposed upon the majority of the country’s population, coupled with a realization that his white privileges are sustained at the brutal expense of others.

When Iqbal Survé fired Cape Times editor Alide Dasnois the day after Nelson Mandela’s death amid accusations of disrespect towards Mandela, a storm engulfed Independent Newspapers. Many pointed to a Cape Times story about one of Survé’s firms as the real reason for his ire.

In the months that followed, newsrooms were torn apart by suspicion, recrimination and what many believed was a witch hunt to expel those not prepared to toady to the owner. Veteran journalists Dasnois and Chris Whitfield tell the real inside story.

When Gail Gilbride is diagnosed with breast cancer, she experiences the full range of emotions. There’s disbelief, anger, confusion, fear, bargaining and, why, yes, indeed, of course she wants to talk to the manager! But then Gail settles on resolve. She’s ready to fight. Not only will she follow her doctor’s instructions and march with the big guns in the oncology centre, but she’ll also tip her helmet to her late mother’s inclination for alternative treatments.

Gail is ready to give her body everything it might need to conquer the disease, recover and live a long life of joy. She nourishes it, meditates, exercises, rests, and explores parts of her consciousness she’s previously pushed to the far corner and ignored. Determined not to be a passenger, Gail hops behind the wheel and embarks on a journey like no other. What she doesn’t anticipate is that she’ll have a furry, ginger wingman for company.

Archie is the irredeemably part-feral tomcat who, when it suits him, moves in the same circles as Gail – and it suits him when he decides she needs the kind of therapy only he can give. In many ways, Gail and Archie are opposites. Where she’s amiable, he can be bellicose. Where Gail is gentle, Archie has claws. Where she is considerate, he is self-serving. And yet Archie brings to Gail camaraderie and healing in the dark hours when, alone, she cannot keep the dread at bay. He’s the remedy she didn’t know she needed.

An inspirational and truly intersectional memoir from global humanitarian and social justice advocate Eddie Ndopu-a queer, Black wheelchair user and one of the UN Secretary-General's 17 Advocates for the SDGs.

A memoir, penned with one good finger, about being profoundly disabled and profoundly successful.

Global humanitarian Eddie Ndopu was born with spinal muscular atrophy, a rare degenerative motor neuron disease affecting his mobility. He was told that he wouldn't live beyond age five and yet, Ndopu thrived. He grew up loving pop music and haute couture, lip syncing to the latest hits, and was the only wheelchair user at his school, where he flourished academically. By his late teens, he had become a sought-after speaker, travelling the world to give talks on disability justice. When he is later accepted on a full scholarship into Oxford University, he soon learns that it's not just the medical community he must defy - it's the educational one too.

In Sipping Dom Perignon Through a Straw, we follow Ndopu, sporting his oversized, bejewelled sunglasses, as he scales the mountain of success, only to find exclusion, discrimination, and neglect waiting for him on the other side. As he soars professionally, sipping champagne with world leaders, he continues to feel the loneliness and pressure of being the only one in the room. Determined to carve out his place in the world, he must challenge bias at the highest echelons of power and prestige.

Searing, vulnerable and inspiring, Ndopu's remarkable journey to reach beyond ableism, reminds us never to let anyone else define our limits.

When Rael Levitt stepped onto the podium at Quoin Rock Wine Estate in December 2011, he was CEO of the industry-pioneering Auction Alliance and at the pinnacle of a glittering 20-year career. But then disaster struck. After being accused by a powerful billionaire of using a ghost bidder to inflate the bid price, Levitt’s reputation was obliterated.

In an echo of the Boxing Day tsunami that he survived in 2004, the self-made entrepreneur was overwhelmed by a media-driven scandal that came at him like a train of killer waves. Once the face of South African auctions, he seemingly sank without a trace. But he was not beaten.

A decade later Levitt has a thrilling rise-and-fall-and-rise-again story to tell. The lessons he learnt from suffering catastrophe and finding the tenacity to survive have laid the foundations for new success. At once candid and controversial, Levitt’s story is ultimately an uplifting one, revealing that the greater the tsunami, the greater the lesson.

A great deal of the revolutionary work that Charles Nqakula undertook as an ANC underground cadre and combatant of Umkhonto we Sizwe was in the Eastern Cape. This book is a well-documented and detailed recollection of those difficult and dangerous times when detention, imprisonment, torture, and even death were always imminent.

It required massive courage and heroism to be part of that array of outstanding leaders and cadres of the revolutionary movements. Readers will be convinced that Charles and his wife/partner Nosiviwe were selfless, dedicated, loyal, disciplined, and brave freedom fighters. This book is noteworthy because Charles remembers, gives due credit, and attaches names to the many comrades who participated in that heroic struggle with him and Nosiviwe. It is difficult to understand and appreciate the dialectical interconnectedness of the individual and the collective. The collective is always more important than the individual but the collective is at the same time the sum total of the individual contributions. In this book, Charles successfully portrays that delicate and complex relationship.

The People’s War describes the work undertaken by Charles and Nosiviwe in the ANC underground and MK units in a dispassionate manner without any self-praise or grandstanding. Charles also recounts how Nosiviwe nearly lost her life in an ambush carried out by Unita on an MK convoy as well as an attempted assassination outside their home in Cyrildene. In the latter chapters of the book, Charles writes about political developments and processes from 1990 up to the present time. He recounts his work as a mediator in the conflicts in Burundi, Côte d’Ivoire, and Mauritania, the pain and anguish at the tragic murder of their son, Chumani Siyavuya, and comments on the debilitating challenges of factionalism, election slates, and corruption degrading the integrity, unity, reputation, values, and electoral support of the ANC.

Anger, hurt, loss, rejection … these feelings are familiar to the families who, in the early 1970s, were forced from their homes in Harfield Village in Cape Town’s southern suburbs. Siona O’Connell brings their stories to light. She examines the lost ways of life, the sense of home and belonging.

David Brown’s images show what life was like in Harfield before the removals, and his images are echoed by recent photos of the same former residents.

The incredible, bestselling memoir of survival, hope and empowerment.

In 1944, sixteen-year-old ballerina Edith Eger was sent to Auschwitz. Separated from her parents on arrival, she endures unimaginable experiences, including being made to dance for the infamous Josef Mengele. When the camp is finally liberated, she is pulled from a pile of bodies, barely alive.

The horrors of the Holocaust didn't break Edith. In fact, they helped her learn to live again with a life-affirming strength and a truly remarkable resilience.

The Choice is her unforgettable story. It shows that hope can flower in the most unlikely places.

In 2003, Thabo Jijana's father was gunned down in a scrap between rival taxi associations who had been forced to operate from a single rank. A decade later, Thabo faces up to South Africa's most violent industry to try to figure out how and why his father was murdered.

In this searing first-person investigation, Thabo puts a face behind a recurrent tragedy that plagues South African working class communities. By speaking to the people who knew his father best he tries to fill in the blanks that are the years that have followed his father's death.

He begins by trying to reconstruct the night the murder took place, but what he uncovers about the ongoing strife that has plagued government's consistent attempts to formalise this multi-million rand industry comes with more baggage than he expected.

Welcome back to Clarkson’s Farm.

So, that went well …

The spring barley crop failed. Just like the oil seed rape. And the durum wheat. Then the oats turned the colour of a hearing aid and the mushrooms went mouldy. Farming sheep, pigs and cows was hardly more lucrative. Jeremy would be better off trying to breed ostriches.

But in the face of uncooperative weather, the relentless realities of the agricultural economy, bureaucracy, a truculent local planning department and the world’s persistent refusal to recognise his ingenuity and genius, our hero’s not beaten yet. Not while the farm shop’s still doing a roaring trade in candles that smell like his knacker hammock, he isn’t.

On the face of it, the challenges of making a success of Diddly Squat are enough to have you weeping into your (Hawkstone) beer, but misery loves company and in girlfriend Lisa, Farm Manager Kaleb, Cheerful Charlie and Gerald his Head of Security Jeremy knows he’s got the best. And it’s hard for a chap to feel too gloomy about things when there’s a JCB telehandler, a crop-spraying hovercraft and a digger in the barn.

Because as a wise man* once said, ‘there’s no man alive who wouldn’t have fun with a digger …’

*Jeremy

A SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER! Waterstones nonfiction Book of the Month (June)! A Time Magazine Top 10 Nonfiction Book of 2016! SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE! `The political book of the year' - Sunday Times! `You will not read a more important book about America this year' Economist!

Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis - that of white working-class Americans. The decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over forty years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck.

The Vance family story begins hopefully in post-war America. J. D.'s grandparents were "dirt poor and in love," and moved north from Kentucky's Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually their grandchild (the author) would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of their success in achieving generational upward mobility. But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that this is only the short, superficial version. Vance's grandparents, aunt, uncle, sister, and, most of all, his mother, struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, and were never able to fully escape the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. Vance piercingly shows how he himself still carries around the demons of their chaotic family history.

A deeply moving memoir with its share of humour and vividly colourful figures, Hillbilly Elegy is the story of how upward mobility really feels. And it is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country.

Franschhoek Literary Festival co-founder Jenny Hobbs' new memoir Through A Dragonfly Eye is a moving account of growing up and coming of age in mid-twentieth century South Africa, full of insight, humour, and tenderness for family and country.

Wilderness guide Sicelo Mbatha shares lessons learnt from a lifetime’s intimate association with Africa’s wildest nature.

Black Lion begins in rural South Africa where a deeply traumatic childhood experience – he witnessed his cousin being dragged away by a crocodile – should have turned Sicelo against the surrounding wilderness. Instead, he was irresistibly drawn to it. As a volunteer at Imfolozi Nature Reserve, close encounters with buffalo, lion, elephant and other animals taught him to ‘see’ with his heart and thus began a spiritual awakening.

Drawing from his Zulu culture and his own yearning to better understand human’s relationship to nature, Sicelo has forged a new path, disrupting the conventional approach to nature with an immersive, respectful and transformative way of being in the wilderness. Both memoir and philosophical reflection, Black Lion - co-written with environmentalist Bridget Pitt - is his brilliant and profound account of life as a wilderness spiritual guide.

As humanity hurtles into the anthropogenic 21st century, Black Lion is an urgent reminder of just how much we need wilderness for our emotional and spiritual survival.

From the acclaimed author of Losing Eden (“Powerful, beautifully written”—Anthony Doerr) an important, moving, passionate and passionately written inquiry—personal and scientific—into what happens—mentally, spiritually, physically, during the process of becoming a mother, from pregnancy and childbirth to early motherhood and what this profound process tells us about the way we live now.

In this important and ground-breaking, deeply personal investigation, Jones writes of the emerging concept of “matrescence” – the wholeness of becoming a mother.

Drawing on her own experiences of twice becoming a mother, as well as exploring the latest research in the fields of neuroscience and evolutionary biology; psychoanalysis and existential therapy; sociology, economics and ecology, Jones writes of the physical and emotional changes in the maternal mind, body, and spirit and shows us how these changes are far more profound, wild, and enduring than have been previously explored or written about.

Part memoir, part scientific and health reporting, part social critique, ecological philosophy, eco-feminism and nature writing, Matrescence is a kind of whodunnit, ferreting out with the most nuanced, searing and honest observations, why mothers throughout this heightened transition are at a breaking point, and what the institution of intensive, isolated motherhood can tell us about our still-dominant social and cultural myths.

"I wanted to write this book before I forgot the finer details. As strange as that may sound, you can forget these things, and it is probably healthier to do so. You can visit the depths of hell – just don’t hang around there for too long." – Gérard Labuschagne

In this gripping – and sometimes terrifying – account, former South African Police Service (SAPS) head profiler Dr Gérard Labuschagne, successor to the legendary Micki Pistorius, recalls some of the 110 murder series and countless other bizarre crimes he analysed during his career. An expert on serial murder and rape cases, Labuschagne saw it all in his fourteen and a half years in the SAPS. He walks the reader through the first crime scene he ever attended, his arrest of the Muldersdrift serial rapist, his experience as the head of the task team mandated to catch the Quarry serial murderer, his involvement with the Brighton Beach axe murders, and more. Despite often being stymied by a lack of resources, office politics and political interference, Labuschagne and his team were always determined to get their man – or woman, as in the Womb Raider case.

The Profiler Diaries is a fascinating – and often hair-raising – glimpse into what it was like to be a profiler in the world’s busiest profiling unit.

François Levaillant was the first and greatest South African birder, the first major figure of modern ornithology, the creator of the first safari, the first anthropologist of the Cape and the first investigative reporter criticising colonial brutality at the Cape. He predicted the rebellion of the frontier Boers and portrayed the dilemmas of coloured identity. He created the most beautiful illustrated bird books of his time, becoming a model for Audubon and others, and inspired a map for King Louis XVI that has become the most valuable African map ever produced. His Travels into the Interior of Africa was a best-seller across Europe and the most widely translated text on South Africa until Nelson Mandela’s autobiography two centuries later.

This book tells how, for a quarter of a century, the author searched for Levaillant’s travel notebooks and the fate of his collection. Glenn’s search took him from the banks of the Orange River to the vaults of the Paris Natural History Museum facing 30 000 dead birds in search of Levaillant’s legacy; from tracing Levaillant’s travels to Theefontein, Pampoenkraal and Kokskraal to showing that the bloubok exhibit in the hall of extinct animals in Paris’s Natural History Museum came from Levaillant; from encounters with billionaires to interactions with French archivists. Glenn’s experiences show that research means searching.

The revised second edition reflects new information and research on Levaillant’s descendants; the provenance of the Paris bloubok; Levaillant’s use of illustrations as a re-viewing of his experiences and his collaboration with Colonel Robert Gordon as a crucial part of his development as an ornithologist.

The book appeals to all natural history lovers, to researchers on colonialism and criticism of it and to people interested in birding who want to know more about Levaillant’s role in establishing ornithology as a new discipline.

Dogtag Memories is a raw, darkly humorous memoir that follows Jon Goetzsche’s chaotic journey through South Africa’s military machine.

Drafted into the Defence Force in 1977as a carefree seventeen-year-old, Jon’s tranquil schooldays are abruptly replaced by the brutal regimentation of army life. What begins as naive indifference soon spirals into a struggle against authority, misfortune and the absurdities of war.

After surviving the gruelling training to become a Parabat, Jon is court-martialled for assaulting a fellow soldier and sent to Detention Barracks. Reassigned to an ordinary infantry battalion, he completes five months of training and is sent to the border for the rest of his two years’ national service, followed by several camps. Through the laughable rules, harsh punishment, grinding boredom, fatal mishaps and clashes with enemy guerrillas, he endures with wit, irony and a stubborn refusal to surrender his humanity.

Told with unflinching honesty and biting humour, Dogtag Memories transcends the typical border war narrative. Decades later, Jon reflects on how those formative years shaped him, offering a poignant, irreverent and deeply human account of camaraderie, hardship and resilience.

Emile Joubert is sy lewe lank ’n kosgenieter.

Op sesjarige ouderdom het sy ouma se kerrie ’n groot indruk op hom gemaak en van daar af was hy ’n onkeerbare smulpaap en het kos hom betower – of dit nou die skoolmaaltye in sy kortstondige verblyf in Londen was, die honger en dors in die weermag, of die seekos wat hy uitgeduik het – Joubert se kosobessies word lewend in sy lekker skryfstyl in die oortreffende trap.

Sy kosreise strek van Londen tot Griekeland, Italië, Frankryk en die dorre landskap van Angola. Die Mars bar, fondue, baked beans, oesters en boeliebief is enkele van die kossoorte wat sy reise vergesel.

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."

How did a teenage refugee from communist Poland become one of the richest women in South Africa? In what ways did she disrupt the financial services industry? What drove her to become an activist exposing corporate and government corruption? What are her secrets for succeeding in business and life?

The founder of multibillion-rand financial services empire Sygnia Limited, Magda Wierzycka is South Africa’s most successful businesswoman. In this engaging and insightful book, she tells the story of her life, from her childhood in communist Poland, her family’s escape and relocation to South Africa, her early struggles in the male-dominated financial services industry, and the formation and growth of her own company, Sygnia.

With a business model built on transparency and low fees, it was a natural step for Magda to become an outspoken critic of corporate and government corruption, exposing wrongdoing and making her many powerful enemies in the process.

In this book, Magda shares the life lessons and business principles that have driven her and brought her success. This is a fascinating story that will inspire you to speak out, lean in, break out, and ultimately empower yourself not only to survive in life and business, but to thrive.

Noni Jabavu was the first black South African woman to publish books on her life. Her memoirs Drawn in Colour and The Ochre People have been compared to Zora Neale Hurston's work.

A cosmopolitan, free-spirited woman, she returned home in 1977 and wrote a weekly column in the Daily Dispatch. 

This book is a compilation of these cheeky, insightful and hilarious columns for a younger audience of empowered women. 

When Stephen Clingman was two, he underwent an operation to remove a birthmark under his right eye. The operation failed, and the birthmark returned, but in somewhat altered form.

In this captivating and beguiling book, Clingman takes the fact of that mark – its appearance, disappearance and return – as a guiding motif of memory. This is how we remember the worlds we are born into, how they become a set of images in the mind, surfacing and resurfacing across time and space. South Africa under apartheid was itself governed by the markings of birth – the accidents of colour, race, and skin. But what were the effects on the mind?

Here a further motif comes into play, for in the operation Stephen’s vision was affected, and his eyes came to see differently from one another: divided vision in a divided world. How, in these circumstances, can we come to a deeper kind of vision, how can we achieve wholeness, acceptance, find our place in the midst of turmoil and change?

In an enchanting and cumulative narrative set on three continents, Stephen’s memories make up the hologram of the book’s subtitle. It is a story that is personal, painful, comic, and ultimately uplifting: a book not so much of the coming of age, but the coming of perspective.

In December 2017, Walter Meyer was stabbed in the heart with a kitchen knife by his wife, Sophia. Dubbed "South Africa's own van Gogh" and critically acclaimed as the finest landscape artist to emerge from this country in the last century, his brutal death left a deep void.

Written by his brother, Frans, along with rare insights from Walter's rehab journals, Impossible Skies explores the artist's roots, his genius as a painter and a poignant relationship between two brothers.

Hierdie is 'n biografie in konteks en lees soos 'n roman.

Die jaar is 1700, die plek Amsterdam. Die bruid is 21 jaar oud en inderhaas getroud met 'n wewenaar wat oud genoeg is om haar pa te wees. Wie is die Franse vrou wat kans sien vir 'n pionierslewe op 'n verre voorpos? Marie Buisset is 'n vlugteling, 'n weeskind uit Sedan, Frankryk, gebore tydens die felste Hugenootvervolging. Sy word die stammoeder van die families Du Plessis en Smith in Suid-Afrika. As vroedvrou - later op die loonlys van die VOC - word Marie (later genoem Maria) die hulp van die kwesbares: 'n verkragte meisietjie, 'n tiener wat geboorte gee en verskeie vroue wat deur hul eienaars, minnaars of eggenote verniel is.

Die leser ontmoet talle bekende name in die Suid-Afrikaanse geskiedenis. Dis 'n verhaal van politieke stryd, ontbering, politiek en liefde. Dis 'n storie oor mense en die uitdagings wat hulle aanpak.

Uit skrapse oorblyfsels soos hofverslae, mediese rekeninge, veilings en testament onthul Joan Kruger 'n ryk en boeiende verhaal, vol humor en patos. Wieg: die verhaal van Maria du Plessis, née Buisset, (1679 - 1751) Hugenoot en vroedvrou is a vonds vir historici en lesers wat nuwe lig werp op 'n gedeelde verlede. 'n Kragtoer.