Holding My Breath is a candid, heart-breaking and very funny memoir of life in one of Johannesburg’s busiest emergency rooms. Biccard’s warmth and humanity shine through the often harrowing tale, creating an unputdownable, uplifting and inspiring book.

The first customer today reports that, the previous night, his right nipple had moved away from its usual location. He noticed its absence when he looked in the mirror and later found it in his armpit.

‘Wow,’ I say with a slight frown. I have never heard of a migrating nipple before. ‘Let’s have a look.’ I slide the door shut and motion to him to pull his T-shirt off.

‘Oh, it has moved back now,’ he says.

’n Blik op die binnekring van die Krugersdorp-kultus

“Daar was bloedspatsels oor die koffietafel, die banke en die banke se kussings. Peter en Joan was oortrek van steekwonde in hul rûe, nekke en agterkoppe. Nicholas het sy pa en ma gesigte na onder in ’n bloedbad op die mat in die sitkamer gekry. Hulle het hul hek en huis vir hul moordenaars oopgemaak, want hulle het ’n afspraak met hulle gehad.”

Elf wrede moorde oor ’n tydperk van vier jaar ruk die gemeenskap van Krugersdorp en haal landwyd nuusopskrifte. Eindelik word al hierdie moorde verbind met Cecilia Steyn en haar kultusgroep, Electus per Deus (uitverkies deur God). Lede van die groep aanbid die grond waarop Cecilia loop en sal selfs vir haar moord pleeg.

Die moordenaars is slim, gewone mense – ’n onderwyseres, ’n finansiële makelaar, ’n kind wat tussen die moorde deur steeds ses onderskeidings in matriek behaal en boonop keuring kry om medies te gaan studeer. Hul slagoffers het bloot ’n sake- afspraak nagekom, min wetend dat dít ’n afspraak met die dood was.

Wie is Cecilia Steyn? Hoe kan een mens vyf ander manipuleer om moord te pleeg en namens haar in die hof te lieg? Watter rol het Satanisme gespeel? Hoe ontduik onervare misdadigers die polisie vir so lank?

Jana Marx beantwoord dié en ander vrae in ’n waremisdaad-verhaal wat gelei het tot een van die opspraakwekkendste moordsake in die land se geskiedenis.

Met behulp van onderhoude uit diegene in die binnekring, hofgetuienis en polisiedossiere oor ’n tydperk van vier jaar poog Marx om die publiek se vrae te antwoord en ’n blik te gee op die binnewerkinge van só ’n kultus.

Mteto Nyati knew as a schoolboy in Mthatha, working at his mother’s store, that he wanted to fix and build things. After completing his studies at Natal University, he turned down a Rhodes scholarship and headed for Jo'burg to take up a position at Afrox. He was the only black engineer and the advice he received was ‘don’t mess up’. 

He didn’t and today is one of South Africa’s top CEOs. This is his inspirational story. 

In this humorous coming-of-age memoir, young Costa finds himself in the middle of a matriarchal triangle.

His sulky mother Victoria is forced to share her kitchen with both her conservative Greek mother-in-law and her bossy sister-in-law. A raucous war in the kitchen takes place, not only for oven territory but also for the affection of their beloved "Kostaki".

An intricately woven portrait of the Greek immigrant experience of a family, trying to navigate South Africa in the 1960’s and 70s.

On the face of it, life looks good for Sara-Jayne. She’s a popular radio personality, a bestselling author and she’s recently been reunited with her long-lost father, nearly 40 years after she was given up for adoption as a baby. Best of all, she’s just found out she’s about to become a mother, with Enver, the ‘love of her life’.

She's convinced that she’s finally heading towards her "happily ever after". But six weeks after discovering she’s pregnant, Enver relapses on heroin and disappears, leaving Sara-Jayne devastated. She checks into The Clinic, where despite the little life growing inside her, she realises she’s never felt more alone.

In her much-anticipated follow up to the bestseller Killing Karoline, Sara-Jayne is now forced, for the sake of her unborn child, to find a way to save herself. But first she has to unravel why everyone always leaves her. Why like that song she's always looking for love in all the wrong places? And why she is so obsessed with mad, bad love?

Brief Hours and Weeks is the author's account of growing up in a small, tightly knit, first-generation Polish-Jewish community in Cape Town in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s.

Observing through at first naive and then later more sophisticated eyes, he describes his childhood and youth in a protective off-the-boat immigrant Jewish family in very British-Commonwealth South Africa as apartheid becomes increasingly coercive.

Through vivid and candid personal stories, he brings to life a time, place, culture, people, and set of mores that no longer exist. At 21, he leaves Africa to study in America.

The perfect match. Or so she thinks. Her warmth and empathy. His charisma and ambition. Yet, Cathy feels safer teaching battle-scarred gangsters in a prison classroom than at home with her own partner.

By day she walks on eggshells. At night she sleeps on the backseat of her car. Her safe place is an all-night roadhouse; her best friend, her journal. The slow boil intensifies until, one day, Cathy finds her grandmother’s armoire smashed to pieces in her bedroom, a hammer on the floor, her life in splinters beside it.

Part memoir, part inspiration, Boiling A Frog Slowly is unflinching in its confrontation of abuse and utterly courageous in its portrayal of redemption.

‘Untamed will liberate women - emotionally, spiritually, and physically. It is phenomenal.’ (Elizabeth Gilbert, author of City of Girls and Eat Pray Love)

Who were you before the world told you who to be?

Part inspiration, part memoir, Untamed explores the joy and peace we discover when we stop striving to meet the expectations of the world, and instead dare to listen to and trust in the voice deep inside us. From the beloved New York Times bestselling author, speaker and activist Glennon Doyle.

For many years, Glennon Doyle denied her discontent. Then, while speaking at a conference, she looked at a woman across the room and fell instantly in love. Three words flooded her mind: There. She. Is. At first, Glennon assumed these words came to her from on high but soon she realised they had come to her from within. This was the voice she had buried beneath decades of numbing addictions and social conditioning. Glennon decided to let go of the world’s expectations of her and reclaim her true untamed self.

Soulful and uproarious, forceful and tender, Untamed is both an intimate memoir and a galvanising wake-up call. It is the story of how one woman learned that a responsible mother is not one who slowly dies for her children, but one who shows them how to fully live. It is also the story of how each of us can begin to trust ourselves enough to set boundaries, make peace with our bodies, honour our anger and heartbreak, and unleash our truest, wildest instincts.

Untamed shows us how to be brave. And, as Glennon insists, 'The braver we are, the luckier we get.'

“Sometime in November 2007 while working as an entertainment and lifestyle journalist, a job that had seen me party and hang out with local and international stars, including John Legend, I realised that I was over my life in South Africa. My job was fab and my life should have been great but it wasn’t because who cares if you get to pose with Beyoncé? I had had enough of writing about people living their wildest dreams. It was time to see what the story of my life would be. I had always had wanderlust, especially for Africa. And so I made the decision to leave South Africa, an urgent need that consumed me and almost drove me to a point of insanity. I planned to spend three months in Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Togo and Benin.”

When Lerato Mogoathle left South Africa for a planned three-month break to West Africa little did she know that those three months would turn into five years.

Vagabond is her hilarious and honest account of her five years of living as a drifter in Africa. In between the borders, foreign architecture and interesting new ways of life, Mogoatlhe found passion, love, laughter and heartbreak. On these pages you will find capsules of time spent in 21 countries in five regions of Africa. You will be regaled by the tales of how she tries to worm herself into hotels when she has no money because of unpaid invoices back home. You will be mortified and proud of how she navigates herself out of difficult situations like being misread by a man who tries to force himself on her.

Mogoatlhe’s book is a travel memoir driven by the belief that whatever else Africa is, it is first and foremost a home. It is punctuated with a deep urge to know the continent differently.

Mzuzephi Mathebula, also known as Jan Note and later as Nongoloza, founded the Umkhosi Wezi-ntaba (Regiment of the Hills), forerunner of the notorious "28" gang. He became known as the King of Nineveh, a man who sought social justice, paradoxically, through antisocial means. Nongoloza's story is also the story of South Africa's violent and racially accentuated past and, to an extent, provides clarification for the criminality that afflicts the present-day society.

Nongoloza Mathebula’s life is a poignant illustration of how political circumstances affect lives and how those lives encourage myths, setting in motion a spiral of events that eventually neither politics nor people have any control over. Van Onselen’s insightful biography tells the story of how a young man became a hardened criminal as the result of a minor incident.

Nongoloza Mathebula’s life is a poignant illustration of how political circumstances affect lives and how those lives encourage myths, setting in motion a spiral of events that eventually neither politics nor people have any control over.

A modern gangster cashes in on the London Olympics; while business, politics and police corruption undermine the operation to stop him.

When billions poured into the neglected east London borough hosting the 2012 Olympics, a turf war broke out between crime families for control of a now valuable strip of land. Using violence, guile and corruption, one gangster, the Long Fella, emerged as a true untouchable. A team of local detectives made it their business to take him on until Scotland Yard threw them under the bus and the business of putting on "the greatest show on earth" won the day.

Award-winning journalist Michael Gillard took up where they left off to expose the tangled web of chief executives, big banks, politicians and dirty money where innocent lives are destroyed and the guilty flourish. Gillard's efforts culminated in a landmark court case, which finally put the Long Fella and his friends on trial exposing London's real Olympic legacy.

Martha Solomons is a simple woman, the daughter of a freed slave. Harry Grey is a priest from the British aristocracy, sent to the Cape Colony of the mid-nineteenth century because of bad behaviour. In the rugged Namaqualand their paths cross and a bond of love develops that stays with them throughout the contrasting landscapes of their lives.

Based on the lives of Martha Solomons and Harry Grey, this fascinating story was first published in Afrikaans, and was runner-up for the MNet-Jan Rabie Literary Award. Elsa Silke's masterful translation retains the spirit and the essence of the era in which this historical novel is set.

To celebrate her 14-year clean and sober birthday, Ferguson organises to take a R3.2 million Ferrari California out on a test drive for the day. Twenty minutes before she returns the car, she is involved in a spectacular car crash, during which she experiences a near-death collision.

The crash is a catalyst for a series of life-changing events. Over the following months her long-term relationship implodes in a heart-ripping showdown of betrayal and deception. She is faced with a litany of legal and financial nightmares as a result of the Ferrari being written off, while certain members of the dog-eat-dog motoring journo industry relish in her downfall. “The thing is that any fool should have been able to see that I was traumatised. Finding a Dutch lesbian in your man’s bed, writing off a R3.2-million Ferrari, hardly sleeping for a year, facing the chop at work, watching your recent Ex-Boyfriend’s penis snap, plus writing a book about a stump-legged, murder-accused athlete … Well, hello! Who wouldn’t feel a tad fucking out of control?”

After she admits herself to a clinic to address her meltdown, in her trademark gritty tell-it-all and often hilarious style, she interrogates the controversial pharma-whore psychiatric industry as she is diagnosed and medicated over her three-week stay. Ultimately Crashed sees Ferguson slowly coming to grips with the meaninglessness of outward material success as she embarks on a painful journey of introspection in search of intangible inner peace and self love in a crazy out of control world. It’s South Africa’s very own The Girl (Monk) Who Crashed (Sold) her (his) Ferrari.

Crashed is the highly anticipated final installment of the 3-part memoir trilogy, following in the steps of her South African bestsellers Smacked (2005) and Hooked (2010).

Die daggaplant (Cannabis sativa) word al vir duisende jare gebruik. Dit is, inderdaad, ’n baie nuttige plant om materiaal en toue mee te vervaardig. Dit is egter die bekendste vir die psigotropiese effekte van dagga se aktiewe bestanddeel, tetrahidrokannabinol (THC).

Die kwessie oor of dagga verslawend is, is nog nie heeltemal duidelik nie. Baie navorsing word gedoen om korrekte en interessante inligting vir gebruikers, hul naasbestaandes, handelaars en almal wat oor dagga wonder, beskikbaar te stel.

Hierdie handleiding bring die leser op datum met alles wat ons weet aangaande dagga. Slegs wanneer al die feite op die tafel is, is dit sinvol om ’n opinie oor hierdie wonderlike plant te waag.

Reflecting Rogue is the much anticipated and brilliant collection of experimental autobiographical essays on power, pleasure and South African culture by Professor Pumla Dineo Gqola, author of the bestelling Rape: A South African Nightmare.

In her most personal book to date, written from classic Gqola anti-racist, feminist perspectives, Reflecting Rogue delivers fourteen essays of deliciously incisive brain food, all extremely accessible to a general critical readership, without sacrificing intellectual rigour.

The first book by a Coca-Cola CEO tells the remarkable story of the company's revival.

Neville Isdell was a key player at Coca-Cola for more than thirty years, retiring in 2009 as Chairman after rebuilding the tarnished brand image of the world's leading soft-drink company. Inside Coca-Cola tells an extraordinary personal and professional worldwide story, ranging from Northern Ireland to South Africa to Australia, the Philippines, Russia, Germany, India and Turkey. Isdell helped put out huge public-relations fires (India and Turkey), opened markets (Russia, Eastern Europe, the Philippines, and Africa), championed Muhtar Kent, the current Turkish-American CEO, all while living the ideal of corporate responsibility.

Isdell's—and Coke's—story is newsy without being gossipy; principled without being preachy, and filled with stories and lessons appealing to anyone who has ever taken "the pause that refreshes." It's also a readable and important look at how companies can market and govern themselves more—ethically and to great success.

The Struggle Continues is a “searing, heartfelt, brutally honest account of the turbulent modern history of Zimbabwe” (Douglas Rogers author of The Last Resort).

This autobiographical political history since the 1950s deals with an era of great turbulence from the perspective a person who has been at the centre of the great Zimbabwean drama for over 30 years, David Coltart.

It is set to be the most authoritative book to date of the last sixty years of Zimbabwe’s history, described by the doyenne of Southern African journalists, Peta Thornycroft, as “a masterpiece”: from the obstinate racism of Ian Smith that provoked Rhodesia’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence from Britain in 1965, to the civil war of the 1970s, the Gukurahundi genocide of the 1980s, the land invasions of the 2000s, Robert Mugabe’s Murambatsvina war on poor urban dwellers in 2005, and the struggles waged by the MDC in confronting a brutal regime.

Shirley Zinn’s story is one of determination, courage, and triumph over incredible adversity.

Born and raised on the Cape Flats, Shirley never allowed her past to dictate her future. She proved that the typical story of a girl from the Cape Flats – that of gangsterism, alcoholism and teenage pregnancy – didn’t have to be her story. Instead she relentlessly pursued her own goals and forged an impressive academic career even when she faced significant odds. And when she’d done that, she set out to conquer the world of business.

Shirley is a formidable woman with an amazing story to tell. She has risen to the top of the pile in both academic and business circles, and yet she has retained great humanity and empathy in the face of great personal tragedy.

Her story has lessons for us all – whether we are ordinary or extraordinary, whether we work in business, in government, or at home. Shirley’s story will inspire you and show you that it is possible to achieve your goals, if you are prepared to swim upstream and be single-minded in getting where you want to be.

It’s midsummer in Wyoming and Alexandra Fuller is barely hanging on. Grieving her father and pining for her home country of Zimbabwe, reeling from a midlife breakup, freshly sober and piecing her way uncertainly through a volatile new relationship with a younger woman, Alexandra vows to get herself back on even keel.

And then – suddenly and incomprehensibly – her son Fi, at twenty-one years old, dies in his sleep.

No stranger to loss – young siblings, a parent, a home country – Alexandra is nonetheless levelled. At the same time, she is painfully aware that she cannot succumb and abandon her two surviving daughters as her mother before her had done. From a sheep wagon deep in the mountains of Wyoming to a grief sanctuary in New Mexico to a silent meditation retreat in Alberta, Canada, Alexandra journeys up and down the spine of the Rocky Mountains in an attempt to find how to grieve herself whole. There is no answer, and there are countless answers – in poetry, in rituals and routines, in nature and in the indigenous wisdom she absorbed as a child in Zimbabwe. By turns disarming, devastating and unexpectedly, blessedly funny, Alexandra recounts the wild medicine of painstakingly grieving a child in a culture that has no instructions for it.

When Chris Hani, leader of the South African Communist Party and heir apparent to Nelson Mandela, was brutally slain in his driveway in April 1993, he left a shocked and grieving South Africa on the precipice of civil war. But to 12-year-old Lindiwe, it was the love of her life, her daddy, who had been shockingly ripped from her life. In this intimate and brutally honest memoir, 36-year-old Lindiwe remembers the years she shared with her loving father, and the toll that his untimely death took on the Hani family. She lays family skeletons bare and brings to the fore her own downward spiral into cocaine and alcohol addiction, a desperate attempt to avoid the pain of his brutal parting.

While the nation continued to revere and honour her father’s legacy, for Lindiwe, being Chris Hani’s daughter became an increasingly heavy burden to bear.

"For as long as I can remember, I’d grown up feeling that I was the daughter of Chris Hani and that I was useless. My father was such a huge figure, such an icon to so many people, it felt like I could never be anything close to what he achieved – so why even try? Of course my addiction to booze and cocaine just made me feel my worthlessness even more".

In a stunning turnaround, she faces her demons, not just those that haunted her through her addiction, but, with the courage that comes with sobriety, she comes face to face with her father’s two killers – Janus Walus, still incarcerated, and Clive Derby Lewis, released in 2015 on medical parole. In a breathtaking twist of humanity, while searching for the truth behind her father’s assassination, Lindiwe Hani ultimately makes peace with herself and honours her father’s gigantic spirit.

As a medical detective of the modern world, forensic pathologist Ryan Blumenthal’s chief goal is to bring perpetrators to justice. He has performed thousands of autopsies, which have helped bring numerous criminals to book. In Autopsy he covers the hard lessons learnt as a rookie pathologist, as well as some of the most unusual cases he’s encountered.

During his career, for example, he has dealt with high-profile deaths, mass disasters, death by lightning and people killed by African wildlife. Blumenthal takes the reader behind the scenes at the mortuary, describing a typical autopsy and the instruments of the trade. He also shares a few trade secrets, like how to establish when a suicide is more likely to be a homicide.

Even though they cannot speak, the dead have a lot to say – and Blumenthal is there to listen.

An unforgettable memoir in the tradition of The Glass Castle about a young girl, who, kept out of school, leaves her survivalist family and goes on to earn a PhD from Cambridge University.

Tara Westover was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, she prepared for the end of the world by stockpiling home-canned peaches and sleeping with her “head-for-the-hills” bag. In the summer she stewed herbs for her mother, a midwife and healer, and in the winter she salvaged metal in her father’s junkyard.

Her father distrusted the medical establishment, so Tara never saw a doctor or nurse. Gashes and concussions, even burns from explosions, were all treated at home with herbalism. The family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children received an education, and no one to intervene when an older brother became violent.

When another brother got himself into college and came back with news of the world beyond the mountain, Tara decided to try a new kind of life. She taught herself enough mathematics, grammar, and science to take the ACT and was admitted to Brigham Young University. There, she studied psychology, politics, philosophy, and history, learning for the first time about pivotal world events like the Holocaust and the Civil Rights Movement. Her quest for knowledge transformed her, taking her over oceans and across continents, to Harvard and to Cambridge University. Only then would she wonder if she’d traveled too far, if there was still a way home.

Educated is an account of the struggle for self-invention. It is a tale of fierce family loyalty, and of the grief that comes from severing one’s closest ties. With the acute insight that distinguishes all great writers, Westover has crafted a universal coming-of-age story that gets to the heart of what an education is and what it offers: the perspective to see one’s life through new eyes, and the will to change it.

South Africa in the 1970s was a divided and increasingly traumatised country, seemingly permanently in the toils of apartheid, and with little space available for open discussion of apartheid policies or awareness of just what those policies were meaning in the lives of people. It was in this context that David Philip, a South African already involved for several years in publishing, became convinced there must be more opportunity for books with informed discussion and debate to be written and published within the country.

He persuaded his wife Marie, also with publishing experience, that they could together set up their own independent publishing company, to publish 'Books that matter for Southern Africa'- in social history, politics, literature, or whatever, good of their kind and ready to challenge mainstream apartheid thinking.

This is an anecdotal account - a memoir - of the lows and highs of a small, cheerful, underfunded but vibrant 'oppositional' publishing company, David Philip Publishers, from the year 1971 through to the birth of the new South Africa.

Another year on the Diddly Squat Farm and Jeremy is still knee-deep in mud and endless challenges . . .

Welcome back to Clarkson's Farm. Since taking the wheel three years ago Jeremy's had his work cut out. And it's now clear from hard-won experience that, when it comes to farming, there's only one golden rule: Whatever you hope will happen, won't.

Enthusiastic and inventive schemes to diversify have met with stubborn opposition from the red trouser brigade, defeat at the hands of Council Planning department, and predictable derision from Kaleb - although, to be fair, even Lisa had doubts about Jeremy's brilliant plan to build a business empire founded on rewilding and nettle soup. And only Cheerful Charlie's still smiling about the stifling amount of red tape that's incoming. But he charges by the hour.

Then there are the animals: the sheep are gone; the cows have been joined by a rented bull called Break-Heart Maestro;. the pigs are making piglets; and the goats have turned out to be psychopaths.

But despite the naysayers and (sometimes self-inflicted) setbacks, Jeremy remains irrepressibly optimistic about life at Diddly Squat. Because It's hard not to be when you get to harvest blackberries with a vacuum cleaner.

And, after all, it shouldn't just be Break-heart Maestro who gets to enjoy a happy ending ....

In general, lives of noteworthy accomplishment are led by people with an obvious talent, or more than one. Occasionally, though, someone with no discernible gift whatsoever may distinguish him or herself with a remarkable life. Such cases invite the question of how? How did it happen? With age I have realised that mine is such a life, and, inevitably, I have asked that question. It may happen in cases like this that, as one searches for an answer, one looks for precedents: or even for gifts not inherent in oneself but from outside. I did neither: it came to me unbidden. As I sang, the lines in the hymn resonated so powerfully I could not get away from them: ‘As noiseless let Thy blessings fall as fell Thy manna down.’ That was it. Unobtrusively I had been blessed – again and again and again.

A dozy, unsocialised child follows a boringly ordinary course through life until gradually things start to work out for him in increasingly extraordinary ways. The only prize I ever won at school was the Natural History Prize, no academic accolades or colours for any sport. I was rewarded for loving undemanding nature; almost a non-prize. Nearly fifty years later, in a small town I had never visited before I was introduced to the author of a slim volume on the geography of the area. “Not THE Nick Norman,” she asked. I might have blushed. In 1987, aged 42 I had married, and gone on to father two children, one now a top lawyer, the other on a similar trajectory in medicine. Having dreamt of being a farmer, I owned a farm in Franschhoek, which put me in about the most envied group of people in South Africa. After a successful career in mineral exploration in Africa and South America I turned my hand to writing about geology in a way accessible to lay readers. Three best-sellers followed. The Red Sea opened up and the River Jordan stopped flowing, for the Israelites to reach their land of milk and honey. In between, though, there were 40 years in the wilderness.

This is my narrative. Yours will be different. Unpack it and you will find blessing after blessing. See how I found mine.