Never have seven people been so hunted. By assassins. By journalists and lawyers in search of the truth and then TRC investigators wanting justice for the victims’ families.

In 1986, seven young men were shot and killed by police in Gugulethu in Cape Town. The nation was told they were a ‘terrorist’ MK cell. An inquest followed, then a dramatic trial in 1987 and another inquest in 1989. Finally, the fact that Eugene de Kock’s Vlakplaas unit plotted and drove the operation was revealed at the Truth and Reconciliation ten years after the murders but Vlakplaas’s real agenda remained shrouded in mystery.

Hunting the Seven tells the story of the hunt for the truth of the Gugulethu Seven in cinematic style. It took a decade to get to the bottom of the killings.

Sifting through the evidence and original interviews with those involved, Roos-Muller reveals that it was Vlakplaas’s only operation in the Western Cape and an elaborate state-sanctioned snuff movie designed to keep the money rolling into the death squad’s slush fund.

The Democratic Alliance won control of the uMngeni Municipality in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands after the local government elections in 2021. As the only DA-run municipality in KZN, uMngeni provides a template for how local government could work in a post-ANC South Africa.

Written by two leaders at the very heart of the project, Saving South Africa reveals the challenges, the triumphs and disasters the new administration has encountered along the way. It is an eye-opening exposé of how cadre deployment has helped to bring the country to its knees. It is a story of incompetent officials, political spies, gunwielding tenderpreneurs, petty theft and grand larceny.

And yet, as we follow the authors on their journey, there is always hope for a better future as the corrupt layers of local governance are gradually stripped away, revealing the responsive and caring civil service envisioned by the South African Constitution.

As an ANC insider, Oscar van Heerden had a ringside seat at the ANC elective conference at NASREC in 2022. Here he presents a gripping account of how political power changed hands and what was at stake as Cyril Ramaphosa battled to consolidate his power.

Van Heerden does not simply give us the numbers, the money, the delegates, the switching, the promises and the backstabbing, but in this powerful account of the inner workings of a cripplingly divided political party, he himself is part of the story, having to contend with his own great disappointment with the party of liberation.

Vivid and unputdownable, Is the Party Over? is a future classic and a must read for these testing times.

For those who could read between the lines, the censored news out of China was terrifying. But the president insisted there was nothing to worry about. Fortunately, we are still a nation of skeptics. Fortunately, there are those among us who study pandemics and are willing to look unflinchingly at worst-case scenarios.

Michael Lewis’s taut and brilliant nonfiction thriller pits a band of medical visionaries against the wall of ignorance that was the official response of the Trump administration to the outbreak of COVID-19. The characters you will meet in these pages are as fascinating as they are unexpected.

A thirteen-year-old girl’s science project on transmission of an airborne pathogen develops into a very grown-up model of disease control. A local public-health officer uses her worm’s-eye view to see what the CDC misses, and reveals great truths about American society. A secret team of dissenting doctors, nicknamed the Wolverines, has everything necessary to fight the pandemic: brilliant backgrounds, world-class labs, prior experience with the pandemic scares of bird flu and swine flu…everything, that is, except official permission to implement their work.

Michael Lewis is not shy about calling these people heroes for their refusal to follow directives that they know to be based on misinformation and bad science. Even the internet, as crucial as it is to their exchange of ideas, poses a risk to them. They never know for sure who else might be listening in.

The first authorised biography of eternal legend Elizabeth Taylor.

Known for her glamorous beauty, soap-opera personal life and magnetic screen presence, Elizabeth Taylor was the twentieth century's most famous film star. Including unseen photographs and unread private reflections, this authorised biography is a fascinating and complete portrait worthy of the legend and her legacy.

Elizabeth Taylor captures this intelligent, empathetic, tenacious, volatile and complex woman as never before, from her rise to massive fame at the age of twelve in National Velvet to becoming the first actor to negotiate a million-dollar salary for a film, from her eight marriages and enduring love affair with Richard Burton to her lifelong battle with addiction and her courageous efforts as an AIDS activist.

Using Elizabeth's unpublished letters, diary entries and off-the-record interview transcripts as well as interviews with 250 of her closest friends and family, Kate Andersen Brower tells the full, unvarnished story of the classic Hollywood star who continues to captivate audiences the world over.

Dare To Believe is a poignant narrative of resilience, courage and hope in the face of adversity. Mmusi Maimane invites readers on a journey through his personal experiences, from the hardships of Apartheid-era Soweto to the corridors of power in post-liberation South Africa.

With insights drawn from his political career and a deep commitment to justice, Maimane shares the travails of party politics, the difficult task of transforming the DA, and his vision for a South Africa where all races can live and prosper together.

This book challenges us to confront the realities of inequality and division while daring to envision a nation united in prosperity and peace. It is a call to restore democracy back to the people and a compelling articulation of Maimane's belief in the transformative power of unity and the promise of a better tomorrow.

As a young journalist, roped into court reporting to cover Jacob Zuma’s 2006 rape trial, Karyn Maughan could not have known that she would be reporting on Zuma’s legal woes for the next two decades – and would herself become his target. Disarmingly honest and deeply personal, this book takes a razor-sharp look at how powerful men use attacks on individuals who try to hold them accountable, as well as on the media and the courts, to undermine democracy.

Adriaan Basson says: 'Brave and brilliant. Jacob Zuma found his match in Karyn Maughan.'

What is your stake in the upcoming 2024 election in South Africa – the most crucial election since 1994? Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the outcome? As a businessperson, consumer, worker or farmer, you will be affected by the election results and the significant changes that are likely to appear in South Africa’s political economy. The 2024 election gives South Africans the opportunity to decide what the country and its political leadership will look like in the future.

Tipping Point – Turmoil Or Reform? examines some critical questions about the country’s political and socioeconomic landscape today and whether the 2024 election outcome is likely to signal more gloom or will it rather pave the way for positive and enduring reforms. Edited by prominent economist Raymond Parsons, the book comprises pieces by some of South Africa’s leading intellectuals and thought leaders, all of whom have seriously considered South Africa’s post-election future.

Among the major themes emerging from the different chapters, which will help to steer the national agenda in the months and years ahead, are: South Africa’s political prospects after 2024; the future role of coalition politics in South Africa; the dynamics between business and the economy; what South Africa’s geopolitical leanings mean for the country’s trade competitiveness; how to make local government work; need for greater community engagement and why doing business in South Africa is challenging.

Tipping Point – Turmoil Or Reform? is as absorbing as it is frank, informing readers (and, importantly, voters) about the harsh reality of where South Africa is today but also offering them hope of a much better tomorrow – which will largely depend on the critical choices they make during this watershed election year for South Africa.

This riveting study shows how the intersection of technology and politics has shaped South African history since the 1960s.

It is impossible to understand South Africa’s energy crisis without knowing this history. Faeeza Ballim’s deeply researched book challenges many prevailing assumptions and beliefs made regarding the crisis.

The book highlights the importance of technology to our understanding of South African history and challenges the idea that the technological state corporations were proxies for the apartheid government. While a part of the broader national modernization project under apartheid, these corporations also set the stage for worker solidarity and trade union organization in the Waterberg and elsewhere in the country.

Faeeza Ballim argues that the state corporations, their technology, and their engineers enjoyed ambivalent relationships with the governments of their time. And in the democratic era, while Eskom has been caught up in the scourge of government corruption, it has retained a degree of organizational autonomy and offered a degree of resistance to those who were attempting further corrupt practices.

The metaphor of 'state capture' has dominated South Africa's political discourse in the post-Zuma presidency era. What is state capture and how does it manifest? Is it just another example of a newly independent, failed African state? And is it unique to South Africa?

The contributors in this collection try to explain the phenomenon from a variety of viewpoints and disciplines. All hold fast to the belief that the democracy that promised the country so much when apartheid ended has been significantly eroded, resulting in most citizens expressing a loss of hope for the future. Read together, the essays cumulatively show not only how state capture was enabled and who benefitted, but also how and by whom it was scrutinised and exposed in order to hold those in power accountable.

The book aims to present a scholarly and empirical understanding of how things went awry, even with various regulating bodies in place, and how to prevent state capture from happening again in the future.

Gwen Lister is a world-renowned journalist, political activist and free-press advocate. Born in South Africa, she moved to Namibia to pursue her journalism career. She launched (with Hannes Smith) the Windhoek Observer and later, The Namibian.

This memoir chronicles her remarkable life, brave journalism and political activism. 

First published in Afrikaans as "Als Is Nie Net Swart En Wit Nie, this expanded memoir probes some of the most pivotal issues facing South Africa today: race, ‘othering’, unremembering, identity, gangsterism, addiction, and the process of making meaning of a society that has become unhinged from its moorings.

Malvory Adams is an author and veteran journalist who served as an editorial executive at mainstream newspapers such as City Press, Sowetan, Die Burger, Beeld and Son. At present, he plies his trade as a News Bulletin Writer at Afrikaanse TV-Nuus on SABC2. Away from the newsroom, he is the singer-songwriter MeZZo.

He walks with the reader through a lion-hearted personal lens and through the purgatory of his travelogue, which starts 15 years before his birth in the tiny Eastern Cape hamlet of Breidbach. He dramatically recounts how his German grandfather robbed him of his grandparents. Premised on that epoch-making deed, he takes the reader on a painful journey of uprooting, an agonising coming of age, and the intricacies of navigating cultural belongings and a bloodline concoction. Next, he plummets horrifyingly into a netherworld of alcoholism culminating in a spine-chilling desperate act.

On this treacherous odyssey to restoration and redemption, the veils of darkness lift, and he now lives in a world that is not stark black and white but where the grey mitigates the storms.

A fascinating inside account of the attempt to prosecute former US president Donald Trump.

Mark Pomerantz was a retired lawyer living a calm suburban life when he accepted an offer to join the staff of the district attorney of New York County in February 2021. His brief: to work on the investigation of former president Donald Trump and the Trump Organisation.

Over the next year, Pomerantz interviewed potential witnesses, scrutinised financial records and learned everything he could about Trump's business practices. He finally gathered enough evidence to support the view-held by many of his colleagues on the case-that Trump should be indicted for a number of financial crimes. But that indictment never happened. This book explains why.

In People vs. Donald Trump, Pomerantz tells the story of his unprecedented investigation, why he and his colleague Carey Dunne resigned in protest when Manhattan's district attorney refused to act, and why he believes Donald Trump should be prosecuted. He draws from a lifetime of legal experience to tell a devastating and frequently entertaining story of how prosecutors think, how criminals act, and how the American justice system works-and sometimes doesn't work. It is a cautionary tale that explores how Trump manages to dance between the raindrops of accountability, and how others might bring him to justice.

A selection of the landmark Supreme Court decisions that have shaped American society
Penguin presents a series of six portable, accessible, and--above all--essential reads from American political history, selected by leading scholars. Series editor Richard Beeman, author of "The Penguin Guide to the U.S. Constitution," draws together the great texts of American civic life, including the founding documents, pivotal historical speeches, and important Supreme Court decisions, to create a timely and informative mini-library of perennially vital issues.
The Supreme Court is one of America's leading expositors of and participants in debates about American values. Legal expert Jay M. Feinman introduces and selects some of the most important "Supreme Court Decisions" of all time, which touch on the very foundations of American society. These cases cover a vast array of issues, from the powers of government and freedom of speech to freedom of religion and civil liberties. Feinman offers commentary on each case and excerpts from the opinions of the Justices that show the range of debate in the Supreme Court and its importance to civil society. Among the cases included will be "Marbury v. Madison," on the supremacy of the Constitution and the power of judicial review; "U.S. v. Nixon," on separation of powers; and "Hamdi v. Rumsfeld," a post-9/11 case on presidential power and due process.