In the wake of her beloved grandfather’s death, Lou and her family gather at their coastal family home for a long-awaited family reunion.

The windswept and wild surroundings remind Lou of who she was before being a mother, a wife, and a professional failure. They bring back memories of Michael, her toxic first love and, according to the family, her ‘bad luck penny’. Then a shocking crisis in the country disrupts the funeral arrangements and forces the family together for longer than planned.

As secrets rise to the surface, the threads of Lou’s life unravel and she faces a difficult choice – after all, it’s only a bad luck penny if you pick it up.

Upon encountering Historian, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s quote “Well behaved women seldom make history” – Malebo knew that she was tired of everyone else but herself having a say on who and what she should be. Appropriating this quote, Malebo boldly renounces societal expectations placed on her as a Black woman and shares her journey towards misbehaviour. According to Malebo, it is a norm for a Black woman to live through a society that will prescribe what it means to be a well behaved woman. Acting like this prescribed woman equals good behaviour. But what happens when a black woman decides to live her own life and becomes her own form of who she wants to be? She is often seen as misbehaving.

Miss Behave challenges society’s deep-seated beliefs about what it means to be a well behaved woman. In this book, Malebo tracks her journey on a path towards achieving total autonomy and self-determinism. Miss Behave will challenge, rattle and occasionally cause you to reflect on your own life – asking yourself the question – are you truly living life the way you want to?

Destructive forces have been eroding the University of Cape Town, Africa’s leading university. This book tells the sad, true tale of what has been transpiring. It is a saga of lunacy, criminality, pandering, and identity politics. The mad and the bad – the deranged, deluded, the depraved – have been granted endless latitude in bullying and abusing others.

The decline began in 2015 with the Rhodes Must Fall protest that resulted in the offending statue’s removal within a month, and which spawned similar protests abroad. Emboldened by their local success, the protestors issued new and ever-increasing demands later that year and then again in 2016 and 2017. Their methods also became criminal – including intimidation, assault, and arson. The university leadership capitulated to this behaviour, and this fostered a broader and now pervasive toxic environment within the institution.

These developments offer important lessons for universities around the world that are yielding to the forces of a faux “progressivism”.

In 1977, RW Johnson’s best-selling How Long Will South Africa Survive? provided a controversial and highly original analysis of the survival prospects of apartheid. Now, after more than twenty years of ANC rule, he believes the situation has become so critical that the question must be posed again.

‘The big question about ANC rule’, he writes, ‘is whether African nationalism would be able to cope with the challenges of running a modern industrial economy. Twenty years of ANC rule have shown conclusively that the party is hopelessly ill-equipped for this task. Indeed, everything suggests that South Africa under the ANC is fast slipping backward and that even the survival of South Africa as a unitary state cannot be taken for granted. The fundamental reason why the question of regime change has to be posed is that it is now clear that South Africa can either choose to have an ANC government or it can have a modern industrial economy. It cannot have both.’

Johnson’s analysis is strikingly original and cogently argued. He has for several decades now been the senior international commentator on South African affairs, known for his lucid analysis and complete lack of deference towards the conventional wisdom.

At once intimate and analytical, Mandla J. Radebe has written a powerful and information-packed biography of one of the signal leaders of the 16 June 1976 generation.

The Lost Prince of the ANC is the first comprehensive enquiry into Mzala’s story, tracing his life from birth to his untimely death in 1991, at the age of 35, just after his return to South Africa. Radebe’s richly researched biography, is the story too, of the radical tradition of the liberation movement, which flourished during its underground days.

This revelatory biography of a critical thinker who had much to offer the post-apartheid South Africa, does more than fill a gap in our history: its insights open a door for the reader to imagine politics and society anew.

It was in 1972 when the seemingly ordinary Craig Williamson registered at Wits University and joined the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS). Williamson was elected NUSAS’s vice president and in January 1977, when his career in student politics came to an abrupt end, he fled the country and from Europe continued his anti-apartheid ‘work’. But Williamson was not the activist his friends and comrades thought he was. In January 1980, Captain Williamson was unmasked as a South African spy.

Williamson returned to South Africa and during the turbulent 1980s worked for the foreign section of the South African Police’s notorious Security Branch and South Africa’s ‘super-spy’ transformed into a parcel-bomb assassin.

Through a series of interviews with the many people Williamson interacted with while he was undercover and after his secret identity was eventually exposed, Jonathan Ancer details Williamson’s double life, the stories of a generation of courageous activists, and the book eventually culminates with Ancer interviewing South Africa’s ‘super-spy’ face-to-face. It deals with crucial issues of justice, reconciliation, forgiveness, betrayal and the consequences of apartheid that South Africans are still grappling with.

John Kane-Berman is uniquely qualified to look back over the enormous political and social changes that have taken place in his lifetime in this fractious country. In his career as student leader, Rhodes Scholar, newspaperman, independent columnist, speech maker, commentator, and Chief Executive, for thirty years, of the South African Institute of Race Relations, Kane-Berman has been at the coal face of political change in South Africa.

The breadth and depth of ideas and events covered here are striking: the disintegration of apartheid, the chaos of the ‘people’s war’ and its contribution to the broader societal breakdown we see today, the liberal slide-away, the authoritarian ANC with its racial ideology and revolutionary goals, to mention only a few. Kane-Berman’s willingness to confront received wisdom is thoroughly refreshing, and he is forthright about the threats to freedom, democracy, and growth in contemporary South Africa, many of which he identified even before the ANC came to power.

Writing, debate, and reasoned argument have been Kane-Berman’s stock in trade and his clarity of vision and personal insight have created a memoir of rare candour and absorbing interest.

Your life's second chapter is a chance to create your best life. This cannot be left to chance. Is it time for a money makeover?

Kim Potgieter is a leading authority on holistic financial planning. She has helped hundreds of clients put money in its right place – making sure it enables them to live the life they really want, one filled with inspiration and meaning.

She is going to guide you through a radical relook at your life, and your money to become the best modern elder you can be.

Take one over-the-top, bolshie, city-slicker Indian woman. One reticent and reserved white husband. And their three children. Add them all to a far-flung village in the South African countryside where mixed-race families are somewhat of a rarity, and you get front-row seats to a lifestyle that is both delightful and, at times, decidedly discombobulating.

Told with huge dollops of that quirky, sometimes perplexing Indian lingo that is unique to South Africans of Indian origin, garnished with hilarity and introspection, The Village Indian is a journey of the self and an authentic celebration of identity, culture and food, and that confusing, chaotic thing it is to sometimes be South African. From run-ins with deadly snakes, to raising chickens, to sprinklings of small-town skullduggery, scores settling, attempted coup d’états and scamming other villagers – you will get all the tea to titillate.

And in a small town, far, far away – meshugas aside – there is the magic of humanity and community.

The Village Indian is a tale for all South Africans.

Africa’s Wild Dogs – A Survival Story is a large-format photographic celebration of one of the continent’s most charismatic and endangered predators.

With only about 6,600 wild dogs left in Africa today, wildlife photographer Jocelin Kagan has made it her mission to bring the extraordinary lives of these often misunderstood and maligned animals into the spotlight. Her remarkable images and personal observations are supported by further insights by an array of scientific experts – their contributions reveal the fascinating behaviour and pack dynamics of these effecient hunters.

Nomadic predators whose territories range thousands of kilometres, wild dogs hunt co-operatively, preying on small herbivores. They are non-confrontational, smart and sociable, and form complex and close family bonds, as this fascinating book reveals. Now restricted to small populations and threatened by human persecution, diseases, habitat fragmentation, climate change and natural predation, these dogs will be supported by the royalties earned from the sale of this book.

Why do the Japanese play rugby? How did Einstein help create Eskom? Who is the richest man in history?

Johan Fourie explores these questions and many more in this revised and expanded second edition of his bestseller ​Our Long Walk to Economic Freedom – an entertaining, accessible economic history spanning everything from the human migration out of Africa 100 000 years ago to the present. This enriching journey through an African-centred history reveals the roots and reasons for prosperity.

Why does one group flourish, but another continues to struggle? Do we have better lives than our ancestors? Fourie shows in his unique and engaging style why the builders of societies – rather than the burglars – ultimately win.

Kapteine McKelly en Mhlanga ontmoet op die misdaadtoneel van ’n mislukte plaasaanval in Muldersdrift. Nog ’n lyk met ’n gapende linkeroogkas word gevind. Dit bring die getal slagoffers wat vanaf Februarie in die Gauteng-area met dieselfde modus operandi vermoor is op ses te staan.

Die wet van Gauteng het ’n eg verweefde Suid-Afrikaanse intrige: politieke faksiegevegte, korrupsie en geldwassery. Hoogs leesbaar, aksiebelaaid en meesleurend.

This short story collection is filled with memorable characters, intriguing plots and twist endings.

With his keen observations and insights into human nature, Mhlongo explores the things people do for each other, but also to each other. Injustice, corruption, love and desire are just some of the aspects of human interaction featured here.

A family refuses to leave when the bank repossesses their house; stalking has an unexpected outcome; a desensitised morgue manager is spooked; and more!

Son of a Preacher Man is a story about a loving but fraught relationship between a father and son in apartheid South Africa.

The father was Bruce Evans, a Jewish-born, evangelical Anglican clergyman who became Bishop of Port Elizabeth. His children grew up in the 1960s and ’70s in a world awash with chapter-and-verse ‘born-again’ Christianity that included ‘talking-in-tongues’, ‘divine healings’ and exorcism.

Gavin, his middle son, who narrates the tale, eventually broke with the religious beliefs he’d inherited and threw himself into the ‘struggle’ for democracy while keeping his father at arms’ length. But they reconciled shortly before Bruce’s death from motor neuron disease in 1993.

The book delves into the psyches of both men and examines how it played out in the 33 years they had together.

An astonishing 94.6% of businesses fail to sell, closing at an enormous cost to the owner, their family, their staff and the economy. It’s a shocking realisation to many business owners that after all the courage it took to start, the creativity and care it took to build, every business faces only two possible ends: a sale or closure. So you’ve got to build to $ell.

Sweat, Scale, $ell shares real business-building stories about how ordinary business owners changed their fate using the Asset of Value™ method, a practical approach to building a winning business. With Pavlo Phitidis, they Sweated to reshape their business to be relevant to a changing world; they built a solid foundation for Scale; and then they pressed hard on the accelerator to ramp up growth in preparation for $ale to create a business any buyer would want.

Phitidis draws on 25 years of direct experience in conceptualising and building businesses across four continents. He has developed and brought to market business assets in excess of US$300 million through a combination of business start-ups, turnarounds, sales and acquisitions. Phitidis started, built and sold 12 businesses in nine years and took the lessons from the two failures, two IPOs and eight sales to build a business that builds businesses. As a co-founder of Aurik he has worked with over 1 500 established businesses across most sectors in the economy, including family businesses, partnerships and lone business owners.

PAVLO PHITIDIS is the resident entrepreneurial and business growth content contributor for Radio 702 and CapeTalk, the presenter and host of The Growth Engines for Business Day TV, as well as a speaker at both local and international business conferences.

Consumers can spend their money as it pleases them. But they should be aware of what they are letting themselves in for. In Buy Right, the South African National Consumer Union shares the knowledge it has gained over years of involvement in consumer affairs with concerned consumers in the country.

It offers vital advice and hints on:

• How to buy food, clothing, furniture, household appliances, toys, a car, property, etc.
• Credit; shopping at supermarkets; mail ordering
• Bank accounts and investments; house and personal loans; life and short-term insurance
• VAT; property taxes; blacklisting
• Home improvements and security
• Car and other repairs
• Health, medical services and patients' rights
• Planning for retirement
• How and where to complain (an alphabetical list of authorities is provided)
• The consumer and the Law
• Food rights

Buy Right will help you to buy astutely and with discretion, get the best value for your money and know how the law protects you.

First there is the killing of the minister of energy. Then the cop investigating the murder commits suicide. Fearing a conspiracy, the minister’s lover hires pi Fish Pescado to find the killer.

Then she goes missing. And Fish is being stonewalled by the cops because in the dark shadows of Cape Town there’s another game being played out. A complex one involving Iranian agents, the theft of highly enriched uranium, the kidnapping of a top scientist, and ex-spy Vicki Kahn being bribed by her former handler to track the terrorists.

The hunt is deadly and nothing is what it seems. A sleeper has been awoken. ISIS is involved. So is the CIA. And chatter leads to talk of a dirty bomb...

Free Fall recounts how and why the present education crisis has become the leading cause for black university students in South Africa. Probing deep beneath the surface of the crisis, the book reveals uncomfortable truths about colonial- and apartheid-era education, and traces the tangled web of connections between foreign and South African business interests, the apartheid government, and the role of universities in propping up a white elite and co-opting a subservient black class to their cause.

It brings to life the people and ideas that, over a century-and-a-half, have created a perfect storm for the present crisis in South African higher education. Malcolm Ray combines intellectual rigour with the intimacy of narrative non-fiction, introducing readers to the main protagonists since the end of slavery in 1834, through the rise of missionary education as an instrument of indoctrinating and subjugating black people, and into the apartheid era. Beyond apartheid, the book details how policy blunders by the democratic government since 1994 have conspired with the past to fuel South Africa’s slide into increasing economic and social disarray.

It is the story of the failure of South Africa's democratic government to deal with major fault lines fissuring higher education, and the circumstances that led to the #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall movements. The book ends on a high note, answering the question: ‘What now?’ This book aims to be the beginning of the solution.

Evil is stalking South Africa’s Sabi Sand Game Reserve. Viewers around the world are shocked when a live lockdown webcast of a safari game drive exposes them to the brutal reality of rhino poaching. A wily poacher then disappears into thin air, confounding logic and baffling ace trackers Mia Greenaway and Bongani Ngobeni.

Detective Colonel Sannie van Rensburg, still reeling from a personal tragedy, is dealing with an angry community on the border of the Kruger National Park – two young girls have been abducted and the local people fear the children have been taken for use in umuti, sinister traditional medicine practices. Umuti is also being employed by poachers, who pay healers for potions they believe will make them invisible and bulletproof.

When another young girl disappears, this time a tourist, Mia and Sannie must confront their own personal demons and challenge everything they believe, in order to follow a trail that seems to vanish at every turn.

At just 17, Fatima Meer threw herself into resisting racism, her first public act of defiance in a long and pioneering political life. Despite assassination attempts, she persevered on the courageous path she had chosen.

In this intimate memoir, Fatima Meer shares her story of growing up and of love, joy, longing and loss. As Meer open-heartedly reflects on her regrets as well as her triumphs, an enchanting tale emerges of a rebellious, revolutionary woman who never shied away from the truth.

Durban North, 1997. Following two shocking and insidious incidents of violence, nineteen-year-old Mary Da Costa is flying to Auckland ahead of her parents to make a new start. She is riddled with reservations – New Zealand is where her late brother was supposed to move – and all she really wants to do is keep to herself and work on her art.

On arrival, Mary comes under the wings of the South African ex-pat community, struggling with its own tensions between homesickness and belonging. Finding work at a local dairy, she meets self-appointed Māori leader Nepukaneha Cooper – Buck, as he’s better known. He and his family have some history with these rugby-mad lovers of apartheid, even more now that they’re encroaching on his turf. If only he had the means to fight them off and realise his life-long dream of establishing a marae on the beautiful strip of coast he has always called home.

Meanwhile, adrift between past and present, Mary is forced to dig deep in order to find her own truths and place in the world.

Nick Mulgrew’s long-awaited debut novel – of grand metaphors, silences, absences, and two cities and countries in flux – is a delightfully innovative, surprising, and warm-hearted meditation on family, loss, and home, as well as a deft examination of dislocation, dispossession, and the cultural blind spots of two very different (and in some ways similar) communities.

DJ Sbu is not your ordinary entrepreneur. He was born to be great and refuses to settle for less.

Have you ever wondered what, exactly, goes on inside a successful entrepreneur’s head – how they came up with their ground-breaking ideas, how they turned them into a business, how they handle failure and what it took to get them where they are today? Billionaires Under Construction answers these questions, and more, as it charts the rise and rise of Sibusiso Leope, one of South Africa’s most dynamic entrepreneurs. From his childhood in Tembisa to the global stage as a best-selling DJ, from music mogul and co-owner of TS Records – the label behind some of South Africa’s brightest young stars – and, more recently, the force behind the country’s first black-owned energy drink, Sbu’s story is one of courage, resilience, inspiration and a refusal to let the put-downs stop him. In his own words, "you just can’t stop his go".

Billionaires Under Construction is a blueprint of Sbu’s success; an honest and direct account of the setbacks he’s encountered, including his high profile dismissal from two of South Africa’s most prominent radio stations and his equally notorious run-in with Forbes. Sbu’s handling of these situations shows the triumph of his entrepreneurial spirit and the tenacity of a man who does, indeed, consider himself a billionaire under construction – and won’t stop until his goal has become a reality.

More than this, it’s a handbook to show other entrepreneurs how they can do the same; a slice of motivation to show them that it can be done, and a tool-kit to show them how.

’n Keur van al Marinda se toekatyd-resepte, die goue gunstelinge waarmee sy grootgeword het! Vier die lewe en dek ’n feestafel wat kreun van oorvloed: beesstert, pasteie, kerrieafval, skaapstertjies, varkribbetjie, doeksagte lamstjops. Brode, patees en nostalgiese slaaie sorg vir bykos. Vir weeksaande is daar lipaflek-pastas en vir suikertande outydse Cremoratert, poffers en vele verassings. En as bonus–konfyte, souse, blatjang en ander inmaaksels staan nou ook hul plek vol in haar reseptespens.

20 South African Short Stories brought to you by Short.Sharp.Stories.

A fraudster cashes out of a life of crime, a mother has a splendid affair, a brave woman never gives up, a graffiti artist spray-paints the city; a poignant friendship comes to a climax in a retirement home, a storyteller understands his true power, a friend delivers a heart-rending eulogy; a young South African searches for belonging in Hong Kong, while another takes a risk assisting a local artist; a photographer explores eroticism through the lens and the body, a group of reggae fans cross borders to seek freedom with Bob Marley, a drummer is haunted by the jazz of Sophiatown; a book on slavery offers a troubled woman a way out, a student faces an impossible choice, the blood moon shines on a forbidden passion … and so much more, as each short story captures the unique moment and meaning of ONE LIFE.

The anthology’s contributors are largely established South African authors who have a track record in the publishing industry, as well as exciting emerging writers. The writers include Stella Douglas, Carmen Gee, Karen Jennings, Joel Kelly, Werner Labuschagne, David Mann, Lerato Mahlangu, Don Makatile, Juliette Mnqeta, Tshidiso Moletsane, Nontobeko Mtshali, Vuyokazi Ngemntu, Jana van Niekerk, Thango Ntwasa, Andrew Prior, Sihle Qwabe, Srila Roy, Khensani Sayiya, Megan Tennant and Jarred Thompson.

Speurder-kaptein Alek Strauss van die FSO word saam met sy span uitgeroep na ’n raaiselagtige moordtoneel. Die liggaam van ’n vrou is in ’n afgeleë bouval in Pretoria-Oos gevind. Advokaat Lynn Rawlins is skynbaar verwurg. Teen die muur staan in bloed geskrywe: Sprich nichts Böses.

Doktor Nadiya Patel, forensiese sielkundige, is vas oortuig die moordenaar se modus operandi is ’n waarskuwing dat nog lewens in gevaar is.

’n Meesleurende spanningsroman deur Marie Lotz, die skrywer van Roofdier.