Raised during the Rhodesian bush war in the 1970s and then immigrating to South Africa at the age of 11, Terry is shaped by a white culture that is racist, unstable, privileged and deeply divided. Her childhood appears idyllic but it is tragically bizarre as the adults around her insist on living their version of normality while the world falls apart.

The first time Terry Angelos has sex with a black man, she's paid £300, working as a 19 year-old call girl in London. Back home it's 1989 and South Africa is being torn apart by political unrest. It's a year before Nelson Mandela is released and 5 years before the country's first democratic election.

White Trash is a remarkable memoir told in vivid detail, laced with dark humour and savage honesty as the narrator unravels what it means to be a white African and what draws her into the brutal world of teenage sex work. But ultimately it's a story about finding a shard of light in the darkness, in a heroic quest to reinvent the self.

Every now and then a book comes along that is both timely and remarkable, that integrates all aspects of life; from recognising one’s roots, developing a moral grounding, building from strong family foundations to follow a chosen path to reach one’s goals, and remaining humble when it all comes to pass.

Time and Chance is an account, in a variety of contrasting images, voices and experiences gained from travelling the world in pursuit of business, where LAZARUS ZIM, industrious Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment (B-BBEE) enthusiast, recounts his journey to become one of South Africa’s business leaders, with several firsts, while navigating the political minefield – disclosing descriptions of behind-the-scenes intrigue and conspiracy – and his interactions with Heads of State in South Africa and around the globe.

The recounting of Zim’s extraordinary rise to success oscillates between hope, faith, ethics, and diligence as he lays bare his successes and failures, and the organic wisdom, knowledge, and wit that have framed his business acumen and moral grounding.

It is a poignant reminder of a black child’s quest to fulfil his purpose in which the writer dares everyone to dream, even in the face of hopelessness.

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.

Tebogo Thekisho, better known as ProVerb, first caught South Africa’s attention in 2005 with the release of his now classic debut hip-hop album, The Book of ProVerb. For over a decade he has been a regular on TV screens across the country as the host of Idols South Africa. While juggling a successful, multifaceted media career, he has also become a thriving entrepreneur with interests in property and TV production.

In this memoir, Tebogo pays tribute to the people who’ve contributed to him becoming the person he is, especially his parents, his grandmother and his siblings, while sharing the lessons he’s learnt through the different seasons of his life. He talks frankly about his public divorce and attempted suicide, as well as his award-winning music and television career.

This is a vulnerable, inspiring account of how Tebogo has risen above his personal challenges to take charge of his life.

Hermann Giliomee, pre-eminent South African historian, dissects the forces that shaped the Afrikaners into an unusual ‘maverick African’ nation.

He analyses long-term forces like the powerful legal position of Afrikaner women, the expanding frontier, and the struggles about race inside the church, along with more recent political history.

Journalist Sarah Bullen and her filmmaker husband Llewellyn seemed like a golden couple, with successful careers and two lovely children. But then Llewellyn discovers that he has a brain tumour. As he pursues a shamanic path to fight the cancer, they are catapulted into a world of ritual and ceremony. With hospitals, surgery and treatments comes a wilder journey of spiritual searching. Then the impossible happens: she falls ill. While in a coma, Sarah travels through near-death and into other realms and worlds.

She comes back with a message and a spark to follow – to choose joy over fear. It becomes a roadmap to allow her to write a new life story and call in a new way of living rooted in bliss, joy and love.

Taking us from Hout Bay to the Mediterranean and back, Sarah’s story is in turn sad, funny and magical, filled with laughter and tears. From African rituals in the bush to a Greek island of sex and celebration, Love & Above is filled with wild rapture and infinite possibility.

In Foreign Native, RW Johnson looks back with affection and humour on his life in Africa. From schooldays in Durban – fresh off the aeroplane from Merseyside – to later years as an academic, director of the Helen Suzman Foundation and formidable political commentator, he has produced an entertaining and occasionally eye-popping memoir brimming with history, anecdote and insight.

Johnson charts his evolution from enthusiastic, left-leaning Africanist to political realist, relating the episodes that influenced his intellectual worldview, including time spent among the exiled liberation movements in London during the 1960s, a sojourn in newly independent Guinea and more recent forays into Zimbabwe. There are wonderful stories, some hilarious, others filled with pathos, about the multitude of characters – Harold Strachan, Tom Sharpe, Ronnie Kasrils, Helen Suzman, Frederik van zyl Slabbert, among many others – that he met along the way.

Perceptive, critical and full of verve, Foreign Native is leavened with a deep humanity that makes it a pleasure to read.

The self-righteous, headstrong lawyering mother has a new and greater challenge. No longer seeking the approval of her successful mother, one of South Africa’s first women judges, Niki is out to find that elusive concept of the ‘work/life’ balance and some real, sustainable solutions.

Her journey takes her deep into feminist philosophies as she struggles to understand the unfolding media-driven drama of the Oscar Pistorius trial while researching issues of ethics in the legal profession. But in between life and children, Niki is also determined to navigate her own way around the new world of print and publishing and connect with her own identity as a writer. How is she going to survive all this?

Something In Between is a light-hearted non-fiction narrative about real issues in a changing world: issues of parenting and the legal profession, tertiary institutions and marriage institutions; issues about the old feminist debate and why it’s still unresolved and some lessons learnt about the world of books and book publishing. A memoir of her last three years and all of it absolutely true.

Locked up for poaching abalone, Shuhood Abader began writing his life story. For over fifteen years, he had been a small cog in a criminal industry stretching from the Cape underworld to China’s luxury seafood market. As abalone – perlemoen, perly – vanishes from the South African coast, Shuhood’s first-person account takes us right into the heart of the crisis.

Kimon de Greef’s postgraduate research on poaching led him into journalism, and today he is the pre-eminent local expert on the illicit abalone trade. He contextualises Abader’s raw, immediate tale by showing how the system works: from desperate fishing communities via gang strongholds on the Cape Flats, tik, guns and police complicity to the harbours of Morocco and Hong Kong.

Journey with the authors through death-defying dives, blackmail, robbery, shark encounters, near-drownings, and chases by police and rivals.

Poacher tells the story of a deadly black market; but it is also the story of one man, deeply conflicted, committed to his faith and searching for a better way.

South Africa’s pre-eminent historian explains the spectacular rise – and probable demise – of the numerical minority that dominated 20th-century South Africa.

The Afrikaners are unique in the world in that they successfully mobilised ethnic entrepreneurship without state assistance, controlled the entire country, and then yielded power without military defeat. Award-winning author Hermann Giliomee takes a hard analytical look at this group’s dramatic ascent and possible disappearance as a nation in a series of well-argued thematic chapters. Topics range from ethnic entrepreneurship, the ‘coloured vote’ and ‘Bantu’ education to Nelson Mandela’s relationship with the last Afrikaner leaders.

It ends with a final chapter on the most likely future for this sometimes admired, often reviled group, which undoubtedly left the largest imprint on South African history in the 20th century.

This book offers a behind the scenes look at the world of a female entrepreneur trying to balance work, life, family and everything in-between.

Cindy has been an entrepreneur since the age of 23. She married, became a mother, a certified business coach, and an international motivational speaker hurtling on to win more awards than she can remember. Wanting to do more, Cindy founded the ROBIN HOOD FOUNDATION in 2005, which has helped thousands of people in KZN. Somehow she has made this look easy.

In this powerful book, Cindy opens up about being successful but not perfect, and how this is totally OK. Cindy tells it how it is, and by being vulnerable, she allows the reader to resonate with the ups and down of life.

Multiple award-winning author Elsa Joubert's memoir about life after the death of her beloved husband. She must come to terms with the loss of independence, friends who die and the changes in her memory and bodily powers. Vivid memories of her eventful life as a celebrated writer are skilfully woven into her story. Filled with wisdom, compassion and humour, this book will leave no reader untouched.

Die oorlewingstog van 'n dapper vrou.

“ ʼn Kale vlakte waar my regterbors eens was. Ek maak my oë toe en laat my brein toe om te proe aan hierdie monumentale ding. Kanker schmanker, besluit ek. Ek is nog net soveel vrou soos voor die operasie. My vroulikheid het toe al die tyd nie in my bors gesit nie. Dit sit in my kop, in my hart, in daardie onmeetbare, onaantasbare iets wat die gees genoem word.”

In hierdie aangrypende boek deel die bekende spanningsverhaalskrywer Madelein Rust die intiemste besonderhede van haar reis met borskanker. Dit is ʼn brutaal eerlike vertelling wat haar belewenis van die siekte met patos en humor uitbeeld. Lesers verkry ʼn eiesoortige blik op die fisieke ervarings van borskankerstryders sowel as die ewig veranderende binnewêreld van dié wat teen die siekte veg.

Kanker schmanker! rus borskankerstryders toe met inligting wat nie altyd geredelik beskikbaar is nie en help hul geliefdes om die reis met kanker beter te verstaan. Dit is ʼn boek van hoop en triomf wat die leser hardop laat huil en laat lag. Dis 'n verhaal vir elkeen van ons wat ʼn stryd van enige aard stry.

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."

This extraordinary account of imprisonment shows with exacting clarity the awful injustices of the system. Sylvia Neame, activist against apartheid and racism and by profession a historian (see the three-volume, The Congress Movement, HSRC Press, 2015), has not written a classical historical memoir. Rather, this book is a highly personal account, written in an original style. At the same time, it casts a particularly sharp light on the unfolding of a policedominated apartheid system in the 1960s.

The author incorporates some of her experiences in prisons and police stations around the country, including the fabricated trial she faced while imprisoned in Port Elizabeth, one of the many such trials which took place in the Eastern Cape. But her focus is on Barberton Prison. Here she was imprisoned together with a small number of other white women political prisoners, most of whom had stood trial and been sentenced in Johannesburg in 1964–5 for membership to an illegal organisation, the Communist Party. It is a little known story. Not even the progressive party MP Helen Suzman found her way here.

Barberton Prison, a maximum security prison, part of a farm jail complex in the eastern part of what was then known as the Transvaal province, was far from any urban centre. The women were kept in a small space at one end of the prison in extreme isolation under a regime of what can only be called psychological warfare, carried out on the instructions of the ever more powerful (and corrupt) security apparatus. A key concern for the author was the mental and psychological symptoms which emerged in herself and her fellow prisoners and the steps they took to maintain their sanity. It is a narrative partly based on diary entries, written in a minute hand on tissue paper, which escaped the eye of the authorities. Moreover, following her release in April 1967 – she had been altogether incarcerated for some three years – she produced a full script in the space of two or three months. The result is immediacy, spontaneity, authenticity; a story full of searing detail. It is also full of a fighting spirit, pervaded by a sharp intellect, a capacity for fine observation and a sense of humour typical of the women political prisoners at Barberton.

A crucial theme in Sylvia Neame’s account is the question of whether something positive emerged out of her experience and, if so, what exactly it was.

Samantha is stamped with a 'bipolar' label that becomes the trajectory for her tortured existence. For the next three decades she will wind through a maze of anguished suffering, accompanied by memory-effacing medical interventions in the form of electroconvulsive therapies, heaps of pills and repellent hallucinations. As her helpless family and loved ones watch, often in terror, Samantha yo-yos between acceptance and denial of her diagnosis. Time and again believing she is well, she plummets into the devastating chasm of her illness.

Life Interrupted is a deeply compelling memoir that brilliantly humanises the sufferer beyond the label. It is groundbreaking in the way the author shares the horrors of psychosis and unbounded mania, the fears of depression and the emergence of recovery.

This book will not only appeal to the over four million people diagnosed with bipolar in South Africa, but to the millions of people who are affected by loved ones with bipolar, as well as to everyone who reads it.

Paul Erasmus’s searing account of his time as a security policeman during apartheid is nothing short of explosive.

In this book, remarkable for its candour as for its effort at Erasmus’s attempt at coming to a reckoning with the atrocities he committed or was party to, we read of the National Party’s determination to destroy Winnie Mandela, to terrorise anti-apartheid activists, and to smear and compromise people who did not accept the ‘Volk en Vaderland’ way. Erasmus lays bare the corruption and power mongering in the South African Police and the fascist associations that some cops were linked to. He names names, but ultimately asks himself how he could have done what he did.

His testimony before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was extensive and allowed a view into the world of Stratcom. This book takes that testimony a step further.

In The Eight Zulu Kings, well-respected and widely published historian John Laband examines the reigns of the eight Zulu kings from 1816 to the present.

Starting with King Shaka, the renowned founder of the Zulu kingdom, he charts the lives of the kings Dingane, Mpande, Cetshwayo, Dinuzulu, Solomon and Cyprian, to today’s King Goodwill Zwelithini whose role is little more than ceremonial.

In the course of this investigation Laband places the Zulu monarchy in the context of African kingship and tracks and analyses the trajectory of the Zulu kings from independent and powerful pre-colonial African rulers to largely powerless traditionalist figures in post-apartheid South Africa.

If you're sick and tired of being sick and tired, this is the book for you. There's no need for superhero capes or for more signed cheques to heal our battered selves or our planet. This revolutionary memoir shows that ultimately, when we unf*ck ourselves, we unf*ck the world.

Crippled by burnout, in a state of near-collapse, bestselling author and corporate leader, Kagiso Msimango embarks on a powerful journey of unf*cking herself. What she discovers, after getting little relief from mainstream healing methods, (while maxing out her medical aid in the process), is a simple and revolutionary truth: the more we unf*ck ourselves, the more the we unf*ck our world.

A book filled with unique revelations to save your life.

Xoliswa Nduneni-Ngema loved the theatre and dreamed of being an actress. She soon discovered that acting wasn't for her – managing productions was. She meets rising-star, Mbongeni Ngema and they marry.  As his success grows, they start a company that births the hit Sarafina! But beneath the stardom, Xoliswa experiences constant abuse.  With Fred Khumalo, she tells her powerful story. 

‘The freezing loneliness made one wish for death,’ journalist Joyce Sikakane-Rankin said of solitary confinement. With seven other women, including Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, she was held for more than a year.

This is the story of these heroic women, their refusal to testify in the ‘Trial of Twenty-Two’ in 1969, their brutal detention and how they picked up their lives afterwards. 

Matthew Buckland built a business that employed 70+ people and counted Vodacom, Naspers, Mediclinic and J&B as clients. He fulfilled many an entrepreneur’s dream when he sold it to M&C Saatchi for millions, and stayed on as MD. But a few years later, he was out on his own again with a new venture and a new battle to fight: against cancer. So You Want to Build a Startup? is a frank, refreshing account of the difficulties – and the fun ­– of building a new-media business. 

In the 1980s, Erika Bornman’s family join, and ultimately move to, KwaSizabantu, a Christian mission based in KwaZulu-Natal, which is touted as a nirvana, founded on egalitarian values. But something sinister lurks beneath ‘the place where people are helped’.

Life at KwaSizabantu is hard. Christianity is used to justify harsh punishments and congregants are forced to repent for their sins. Threats of physical violence ensure adherence to stringent rules. Parents are pitted against children. Friendships are discouraged. Isolated and alone, Erika lives in constant fear of eternal damnation.

At 17, her grooming at the hands of a senior mission counsellor begins. For the next five years, KwaSizabantu wages emotional, psychological and sexual warfare on her, until, finally, she manages to break free and walk away at the age of 21.

Escaping a restrictive religious community is difficult, but rehabilitation into ‘normal’ life after a decade of ritual humiliation, brainwashing and abuse is much more painful, as Erika soon discovers. She cannot ignore her knowledge of the grievous human-rights abuses being committed at KwaSizabantu, and so she embarks on a quest to expose the atrocities. With her help, News24 launches a seven-month investigation, culminating in a podcast that will go on to win the internationally renowned One World Media Award for Radio and Podcast in 2021.

In Mission of Malice: My Exodus from KwaSizabantu, Erika chronicles her journey from a fearful young girl to a fierce activist determined to do whatever it takes to save future generations and find personal redemption and self-acceptance.

South African born-and-raised Hollywood screenwriter Helena Kriel is researching the ancient text of the Kama Sutra for a movie she’s writing. At the same time, she is travelling to India to meet with sages and find answers to the universal challenges of sex and love. While searching for love in her doomed relationships, little does she know she will find her answers in caring for her dying brother, Evan, in South Africa.

Set in the mid-1990s, South Africa is just emerging from the darkness of apartheid and bursting with vibrant chaos. The story zooms in on an intense year in the narrator’s life. It centres around the lively and eccentric South African Kriel family: Maya, the combative but inspired mother; Lexi, the sister recently returned from living in a temple in India; Ross, the younger brother diving with sharks; and Helena, the narrator, herself on a journey to understand love and death. At the heart of the story is Evan, her terminally ill 30-year-old gay brother, who has been keeping his illness a shameful secret. Conscious, sensitive, terrified and trying to hang onto sanity as his world changes, Evan becomes paralysed then finally goes blind as death draws ever closer. But it is Evan who leads the family through the fire.

In living through her brother’s fight to stay alive, the narrator finds herself at the heart of a savage story, one she would not have chosen. How could she know when she set out to India to find ancient solutions to the modern problems of our age that her brother’s approaching death would be her greatest teacher? How could she imagine that dying brings everything to life?

The Year Of Facing Fire is an astoundingly written memoir by one of South Africa’s finest writers. It traverses universal themes including love, death and sex, and finds value in the ordinary and great beauty in the uncertain.

In this autobiographical account of a lifetime spent observing, researching and photographing birds, Peter Steyn shares experiences that span some 70 years.

His story starts and ends in Cape Town, South Africa, but in between we read about:

• the 17 years he spent in Zimbabwe – his most productive in terms of ornithological research
• his worldwide travels in a quest to study birds
• his regular spells as a lecturer on cruise-ship voyages
• trips from the Arctic to the Antarctic, to remote Southern Ocean islands and to several Indian Ocean islands and St Helena
• travels also to the USA, South America, Australia, New Zealand and Ethiopia – all in pursuit of birds

His detailed and fascinating memoir captures the author’s great enthusiasm for birds and their role in his shaping his life and experiences.

Kingdom of Daylight: Memories of a Birdwatcher is well illustrated and features more than 400 photographs taken during Peter’s lifelong journey with birds.