We would all love to eat less carbohydrates and switch to a low-carb diet, but many of us think we just do not have the time. We believe that low-carb cooking and baking are time consuming, because you have to start from scratch, and it involves specialised ingredients which may be expensive or hard to find. Not so, says Vickie de Beer, who believes the problem lies in the fact that we have become afraid of the kitchen and lost the know-how of basic cooking techniques. The truth is that you can still cook nutritional and flavourful meals without refined carbohydrates even when you are pressed for time.

In Low-carb Express, Vickie shows that with a little planning and better time management, you can cook healthy meals in a cinch that will not only benefit you and your family’s overall health, but might also benefit your budget. In Low-carb Express, you plan your meals around your available time. Whether you have five minutes to whip up a nutritionally dense egg scramble or immune-boosting smoothie, or half an hour to make a delicious low-carb bobotie or the best-ever low-carb cupcakes, Vickie proves that there is no such thing as too little time to make healthy food choices.

With recipes that take between five and thirty minutes to prepare, there really are no more excuses!

It's time to fight back.

Each day, more South Africans are targeted, labelled, and hounded out of society for expressing their opinions - ordinary opinions that just a few years ago were accepted as rational common sense. Have you been "cancelled" by an online mob that won't stop harassing you until you're fired from your job? Helen Zille almost was - but she survived by fighting back. In #StayWoke: Go Broke, the bestselling author and defining South African political figure explains why the woke Left constitutes a greater threat to South Africa's future than the populist Right does.

Now more than ever, liberals must strengthen their spines and fight for their values - or be eviscerated in the Culture Wars raging across the English-speaking world. If you're looking for an incisive, indispensable survival guide through this tumultuous period of South African history, then #StayWoke: Go Broke is for you.

Banting has moved on since the Real Meal Revolution, and wow what a success story it is... By watching the detail an estimated millions of KG's have been lost and health has returned to so many.

Rita Venter, (founder), Kim Blom and Natalie Lawson are the darlings of Banting 7 Day Meal Plans Facebook group, spreading love and kindness and in so doing turning lives around.

They are not scientists, doctors, or nutritionists but decided to take back their health and help others do the same. Through extensive research, personal testing and adapting where necessary, they regained their energy, their bodies and their lives.

The group has over 1,6-million followers, it grew by 100 000 members last month. It has 3M interactions per month. It's the largest nutrition group in the world on Facebook.

Do you want to build your wealth and secure your financial future? Do you want to ensure that inflation does not eat away at everything that you have worked so hard for? Do you want to own wealth outside of the paper financial system? If your answer to these three
questions is yes, then you need to own real money. Not rands, dollars or euros. These are merely fiat currencies. You want to own gold and silver, as without them, your wealth is only worth the value of the ink and the paper on which it is printed.

For thousands of years, holders of gold and silver have discovered that both metals are monetary antidotes against global financial chaos caused by debt, fiscal imprudence and ad infinitum money-printing. The proprietor of even a few ounces of gold is not only an
investor, but an individual with the assurance that their wealth and purchasing power remains preserved.

This book is not an attempt to coerce investors into allocating a portion of their total investment portfolio to precious metals. Rather, it is concerned with speaking directly to the South African investor and decluttering and contextualising the vast amounts of information
available about precious metals. This book also provides counsel that the mainstream financial industry has disregarded at best, and suppressed at worst.

A young girl on the Cape Flats is gifted in exchange for a bottle of alcohol, a woman is beaten by her boyfriend and told to bezekela (persevere), a businesswoman is asked for sexual favours to secure a contract, while a child rapist is released on bail after three years...

South Africa is a country at war with its women. Rarely a woman can be found who has not been the victim of some kind of abuse or does not know a friend or a family member who has. Gender-based violence takes many different forms – emotional, financial, physical, sexual and structural – and it can be meted out by strangers, intimate partners or a family member.

Many women are overcome by a sense of shame when they are sexually or emotionally abused but sharing what was once a secret, helps to break shame’s hold. ‘I am not defined by the abuse I have suffered,’ writes Sue Nyathi. ‘I am not a victim; I am a survivor.’

In When Secrets Become Stories, women from all walks of life, across racial lines, age and income demographics, boldly speak out. With contributions by Lorraine Sithole, Desiree-Anne Martin, Mamokgethi Phakeng, Shafinaaz Hassim, Cathy Park Kelly and Olivia Jasriel, who as a child was sexually abused by tennis star Bob Hewitt.

Every decision we make is a decision about the future. We constantly make choices that affect the next week, year or decade, but get blinded by what we want or expect the future to be. Cognitive traps lie everywhere: failing to question our assumptions; believing in greater certainty and personal control than life allows; or missing signals because we’re distracted by the noise.

The post-2020 world demands a revolutionary way of looking ahead, and in these unpredictable times, the key to good futures thinking is good thinking. The goal of constructive futurism is not to forecast specific events, but to plot a series of scenarios that show what could happen. Consequently, we can work towards the future we want, avoid the ones we don’t, and be prepared to manage the risks and opportunities no matter what.

In Thinking the Future, scenario specialists Clem Sunter and Mitch Ilbury teach us the futurist’s art of decision-making, where the flexibility of thinking like a fox plays a key role in adapting to a complex and interconnected world. The book rejects the appealing but misleading self-help narrative that you can decide your future through sheer determination in pursuit of your goals and replaces it with a more dynamic approach.

Isaac Newton said: ‘If I have seen further than others, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.’ By reimagining seminal concepts thought up by some of history’s greatest thinkers, the authors detail the dos and don’ts for thinking the future and handling its uncertainty in a constructive way.

Cops and Robbers: we think we know how to tell the good guys from the bad, but when it comes to Cape Town’s crime scene, things are anything but clear cut. Controlled by gangs, fuelled by drugs and policed by cops that, all too often, get caught on the wrong side of the action.

Among the Cape Town cops who have consistently claimed that colleagues are trying to pin crimes on them are Major General Andre Lincoln (former head of a national police unit mandated by Nelson Mandela), Major General Jeremy Vearey (known as SA’s top gang buster) and Lieutenant Colonel Charl Kinnear (who was investigating some of the country's most brutal underworld crimes when he was assassinated in September 2020). Colleagues and suspects alike pointed to all three as colluding with criminals. Who is telling the truth?

Journalist Caryn Dolley has tracked this tangled trail, following the corruption breadcrumbs, sifting through court documents, laying fact upon fact and exposing the depths and breadth of systemic corruption that was set in place during apartheid and has only become more entrenched during the first decades of our democracy. She has traced the rot from cops to underworld to politicians and back, exposing duplicitous networks that have for decades ensnared South Africa in an expanding cycle of organised crime and cop claim crossfire. At the centre of this crisis is the mounting collateral: the victims of Cape Town’s manufactured killing fields.

To The Wolves tells the true life story of how South Africa’s underworld came to be, what continues to fuel it today and how the deception and lies go all the way to the top...

Kojo Baffoe embodies what it is to be a contemporary African man. Of Ghanaian and German heritage, he was raised in Lesotho and moved to South Africa at the age of 27. Forever curious, Kojo has the enviable ability to simultaneously experience moments intimately and engage people (and their views) sincerely, while remaining detached enough to think through his experiences critically. He has earned a reputation as a thinker, someone who lives outside the box and free of the labels that society seeks to place on us.

Listen to Your Footsteps is an honest and, at times, raw collection of essays from a son, a father, a husband, a brother and a man deeply committed to doing the internal work. Kojo reflects on losing his mother as a toddler, being raised by his father, forming an identity, living as an immigrant, his tussles with substance abuse, as well as his experiences of fatherhood, marriage and making a career in a fickle industry. He gives an extended glimpse into the experiences that make boys become men, and the battles that make men discover what they are made of, all the while questioning what it means to be ‘a man’.

Female Fear Factory is the much-anticipated follow up to the 2016 Sunday Times Alan Paton Award winner Rape: A South African Nightmare.

Where Rape: A South African Nightmare introduced strategies for disrupting rape culture at an individual level, Female Fear Factory offers an even bolder vision for collective action against all cultures of sexual violence.

Like the previous book on which it builds, Female Fear Factory fuses intellectual rigour and extensive research, written by one of South Africa's keenest minds, award-winning Professor Pumla Dineo Gqola.

What comes to mind when you think about sex? The expression of love? Past shame and hurt? Current pleasure?

Touch explores sex as a vast, yet intertwined experience with oneself and between people. It draws on the experiences of sex from people across genders, sexualities – even borders. It delves into the ways in which sex features in our lives.

Sex can be fun, tricky, and heart-breaking, and this book covers all this and much more. Compiled by Tiffany Kagure Mugo and Kim Windvogel, the pieces are real, expressive, cathartic and dare we say it, sexy.

What if you could learn a new way of communicating that could instantly improve all of the relationships in your life?

If you are fighting with your partner, feeling disconnected from your family, getting frustrated with colleagues and experiencing misunderstandings with your friends, you need to read this book.

That’s Not What I Meant! is a punchy how-to guide that will help you to be clear about your message, listen with purpose and start creating workable, win-win relationships.

A deeply felt account of the relationship between a mother and son, and an exploration of what care for the dying means in contemporary society.

The book is emotionally complex – funny, sad and angry – but above all, heartfelt and honest. It speaks boldly of challenges faced by all of us, challenges which are often not spoken about and hidden, but which deserve urgent attention. This is first and foremost a work of the heart, a reflection on what relationships mean and should mean.

There is much in the book about relationships of care and exploitation in southern Africa, and about white Jewish identity in an African context. But despite the specific and absorbing references to places and contexts, the book offers a broader, more universal view.

All parents of adult children, and all adults who have parents alive, or have lost their parents, will find much in this book to make them laugh, cry, think and feel.

How I Accidentally Became a Global Stock Photo and Other Strange and Wonderful Stories is part memoir, part travelogue and part love letter. Shubnum Khan takes the reader on a journey around the world. Whether it is teaching children in a remote village in the Himalayas, attending a writers’ residency where the movie The Blair Witch Project was shot, getting pulled out of the ocean in Turkey or becoming a bride on a rooftop in Shanghai, Shubnum is quirky, moving and vulnerable in what she shares.

Shubnum offers an introspective reflection on what it means to be a woman, particularly a single Muslim woman in South Africa, trying to find herself in a modern world. The stories are drawn from her life journey, which has been full of unexpected twists and turns, and are interspersed with reflections on culture and religion as well as musings on family, relationships and love.

The Mindy Project meets Bridget Jones’s Diary with a side of Keeping Up With The Kandasamys, this is a book about holding onto hope and a reminder that once ‘you step off the edge, anything can happen’.

After an extraordinary four-year battle, Gabi Lowe lost her beautiful, talented 20-year-old daughter, Jenna Lowe, on 8 June 2015 to pulmonary arterial hypertension, a rare degenerative lung disease, following a double lung transplant.

Jenna was young, bright and articulate. She was LEAD SA’s Youth Hero of the Year in 2015. Her death was mourned by thousands of people whose lives she had touched. During her short but full life, Jenna and the Lowe family raised much-needed awareness around this rare and devastating disease, highlighting the dire need for access to medication and organ donors locally. Although desperately ill, Jenna became the face for organ donation in South Africa through the hugely successful #GetMeTo21 campaign in which she invited all South Africans to attend her twenty-first birthday celebration by clicking on a link to become an organ donor. Tragically, Jenna died four months before reaching her milestone.

Brilliantly written, riveting in all its terrible truth and pain, in this brutally honest memoir Gabi Lowe shares her family’s desperate fight to save Jenna’s life. Get Me to 21 will inspire us to believe that the ability to face even the darkest, and most unimaginable, lives deep within us all.

Are you a woman who has had a lifelong struggle with your weight and tried many different diets unsuccessfully? Do you struggle with yo-yo dieting and emotional eating and do not want a programme that is too restrictive or hard to follow? Do you suffer from type 2 diabetes or are you insulin resistant?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, then Your 12-week Body & Mind Transformation is for you! This is not a diet book. Instead, this hands-on, practical guide offers a permanent lifestyle change that will help you correct your eating habits by changing your mindset to achieve the results you want. Spread over 12 weeks, this easy-to-follow programme will teach you how to embark on a life-changing journey one step, and one day, at a time.

Each week features a healthy, nourishing and delicious meal plan that is low in sugar, quick and easy to prepare, and suitable for the whole family to enjoy. The book is also full of practical tips, advice and weekly homework tasks to help you identify what is holding you back mentally and emotionally. Shopping and swap-out lists are included too, as are weekly exercises that are easy to do at home, with links to online video demonstrations.

With its focus on a low sugar intake and intermittent fasting, which has proven to be the best and most effective method to boost weight loss, improve the immune system and rebalance hormones, Your 12-week Body & Mind Transformation will help you overcome emotional eating and forever put a stop to yo-yo dieting.

For two decades before a railway system linked southern Africa’s principal cities in the mid-1890’s, the world’s richest supplies of diamonds and gold were transported by coach and horses to distant ports for export. For Irish soldiers based at Fort Napier, Pietermaritzburg, the temptation of this fabulous wealth proved irresistible: they deserted by the score and, as members of the ciminal ‘Irish Brigade’, embarked on a spree of bank, safe and highway robberies.

Masked Raiders follows the wild exploits of legendary brigands like the McKeone brothers and ‘One Armed Jack’ McLoughlin, who ravaged the subcontinent, from the mining towns of Barberton, Kimberley and Johannesburg, to the borders of Basotholand, Bechuanaland, Mozambique and Rhodesia. With tales of heists, safe-cracking, illegal gold dealings, prison breaks and hidden roadside treasure, the book reveals the potency of the highveld’s ‘criminal heroes’.

Startling insights also reveal how the hidden grammar of brigandage informed political actions of the day, such as the Jameson Raid, and how the movement of bandits across the interior helped shape the borders of what was to become modern South Africa.

When last did you get lost? We rarely do in the era of Google Maps and Waze, but satellite navigation systems are of no use when disruption turns our lives upside down. When swirling mists of uncertainty block our view of the future, we might question our ability to cope. But with awareness, determination and practise we can improve our competence, build our resilience and confidence, and gain a sense of control, even when everything feels out of control.

Whether your life has been disrupted by death, divorce, disease, Covid-19 lockdown, working from home, moving town, starting a new job, or any of a host of other disruptive events that can either make or break you, this book will guide you to the best possible outcome. Disruption is never comfortable, but regardless of whether it is positive or negative, it is a catalyst for change.

Future-Proof Yourself provides simple but effective lessons and frameworks to help you future-proof yourself to win at both work and life. Dip into chapters on disruption, remote working, resilience, teamwork, leadership and family, and learn how to remain focused, utilise pressure and create a recipe for personal success. A distillation of Nikki Bush’s professional insights as a human-potential and parenting expert, combined with her personal honesty and vulnerability, this book is a must-read for anyone looking to harness their courage and curiosity to build a rewarding, fulfilling future for themselves – no matter what life throws at them.

By the time Shana Fife is 25 she has two kids from different fathers. To the coloured people she grew up around, she is a jintoe, a jezebel, jas, a woman with mileage on the p*ssy. She is alone, she has no job and, as she is constantly reminded by her family, she is pretty much worthless and unloveable. How did she become this woman, the epitome of everything she was conditioned to strive not to be?

Unsettlingly honest and brutally blunt, Ougat is Shana Fife’s story of survival: of surviving the social conditioning of her Cape Flats community, of surviving sexual violence and depression, and of ultimately escaping a cycle of abuse. Exploring themes of sexuality, marriage and motherhood, rape, drugs and depression and cultural identity, Shana describes – with the self-deprecating humour her followers love so much – what it means to be a coloured woman, who gives coloured womanhood meaning and, ultimately, how surviving life as a coloured woman means being OK with giving a giant ‘f*ck you’ to the norm.

A powerful, fresh and disarming new voice – Shana’s writing is like nothing you’ve read before.

"I wrote this book because I believe the road to financial freedom is a journey everyone can embark on. I wrote this book with you in mind. You, who perhaps have never been taught anything about how money works. You, who have been too intimidated to pick up and read a book about personal finance because you were too scared of the jargon. You, who want to #getyourmoneyright. I had you in mind when I wrote this book." – Mapalo Makhu

If you are a millennial who is trying to figure out how money works, this book is for you. With simple, relatable and sometimes amusing stories about how to manage money on a day-to-day basis, you will learn how to change your mindset about money, get out of debt and stay debt-free, invest your money and, ultimately, live your best life.

You’re Not Broke, You’re Pre-Rich will help you, the young professional, to think differently about money, while covering pertinent topics like black tax, savings, budgeting, emergency funds and financial scams, as well as estate and retirement planning (and why you should care right now!). It is the best class you never attended… in a book!

South Africa’s democracy is often seen as a story of bright beginnings gone astray, a pattern said to be common to Africa. The negotiated settlement of 1994, it is claimed, ended racial domination and created the foundation for a prosperous democracy – but greedy politicians betrayed the promise of a new society.

In Prisoners Of The Past, Steven Friedman astutely argues that this misreads the nature of contemporary South Africa. Building on the work of the economic historian Douglass North and the political thinker Mahmood Mamdani, Friedman shows that South African democracy’s difficulties are legacies of the pre-1994 past. The settlement which ushered in majority rule left intact core features of the apartheid economy and society. The economy continues to exclude millions from its benefits, while racial hierarchies have proved stubborn: apartheid is discredited, but the values of the pre-1948 colonial era, the period of British colonisation, still dominate. Thus South Africa’s democracy supports free elections, civil liberties and the rule of law, but also continues past patterns of exclusion and domination.

Friedman reasons that this ‘path dependence’ is not, as is often claimed, the result of constitutional compromises in 1994 that left domination untouched. This bargain was flawed because it brought not too much compromise, but too little. Compromises extended political citizenship to all but there were no similar bargains on economic and cultural change. Using the work of the radical sociologist Harold Wolpe, Friedman shows that only negotiations on a new economy and society can free South Africans from the prison of the past.

The Savvy Investor’s Pocket Guide is a self-improvement guide that provides ordinary people with the tools to become financially savvy quickly and successfully. Identifying the common mistakes people make when dealing with their finances, the guide sets out how to rectify them. It also highlights how one can achieve financial independence by cutting back on some expenses, like luxury cars, and the benefits of starting to save as early as possible.

The book also explains in easy-to-understand terms how to draw up and stick to a budget; make shrewd investments in various investment vehicles; consolidate and eliminate debt; draw up a will; get the most out of short-term and life insurance; and save enough money to retire.

The Savvy Investor’s Pocket Guide serves as a wake-up call to stop wasting money and start investing for a financially secure future. A must-read for anyone who wants to not only improve their finances, but also their life in general.

Can people who live in shantytowns, shacks and favelas teach us anything about democracy? About how to govern society in a way that is inclusive, participatory and addresses popular needs? This book argues that they can.

In a study conducted in dozens of South Africa’s shack settlements, where more than 9 million people live, Trevor Ngwane finds thriving shack dwellers’ committees that govern local life, are responsive to popular needs and provide a voice for the community. These committees, called ‘amakomiti’ in the Zulu language, organise the provision of basic services such as water, sanitation, public works and crime prevention especially during settlement establishment.

Amakomiti argues that, contrary to common perception, slum dwellers are in fact an essential part of the urban population, whose political agency must be recognised and respected. In a world searching for democratic alternatives that serve the many and not the few, it is to the shantytowns, rather than the seats of political power, that we should turn.

Land reform and the possibility of expropriation without compensation are among the most hotly debated topics in South Africa today, met with trepidation and fervour in equal measure. But these broader issues tend to obscure a more immediate reality: a severe housing crisis and a sharp increase in urban land occupations.

In Promised Land, Karl Kemp travels the country documenting the fallout of failing land reform, from the under-siege Philippi Horticultural Area deep in the heart of Cape Town’s ganglands to the burning mango groves of Tzaneen, from Johannesburg’s lawless Deep South to rural KwaZulu-Natal, where chiefs own vast tracts of land on behalf of their subjects. He visits farming communities beset by violent crime, and provides gripping, on-the-ground reporting of recent land invasions, with perspectives from all sides, including land activists, property owners and government officials. Kemp also looks at burning issues surrounding the land debate in South Africa – corruption, farm murders, illegal foreign labour, mechanisation and eviction – and reveals the views of those affected.

Touching on the history of land conflict and conquest in each area, as well as detailing the current situation on the ground, Promised Land provides startling insights into the story of land conflict in South Africa.

Indigenous societies that are steeped in patriarchy have various channels through which they deal with abusive characteristics of relations in some of these communities. One such route is through songs, which sanction women to voice that which, bound by societal expectations, they would not normally be able to say. This book focuses on the nature of women’s contemporary songs in the rural community of Zwelibomvu, near Pinetown in KwaZulu-Natal. It aims to answer the question ‘Bahlabelelelani – Why do they sing?’, drawing on a variety of discourses of gender and power to examine the content and purposes of the songs.

Restricted by the custom of hlonipha, women resort to allusive language, such as is found in ukushoza, a song genre that includes poetic elements and solo dance songs. Other contexts include women’s social events, such as ilima, which refers to the collective activity that takes place when a group of women come together to assist another woman to complete a task that is typically carried out by women. During umgcagco (traditional weddings) and umemulo (girls’ coming-of-age ceremonies), songs befitting the occasion are performed. And neighbouring communities come together at amacece to perform according to izigodi (districts), where local maskandi women groups may be found performing for a goat or cow stake.

The songs, when read in conjunction with the interviews and focus group discussions, present a complex picture of women’s lives in contemporary rural KwaZulu-Natal, and they offer their own commentary on what it means to be a woman in this society.

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.