Part literary history, part feminist historiography And Wrote My Story Anyway critically examines influential novels in English by eminent black female writers.

Studying these writers' key engagements with nationalism, race and gender during apartheid and the transition to democracy, Barbara Boswell traces the ways in which black women's fiction critically interrogates narrow ideas of nationalism. She examines who is included and excluded, while producing alternative visions for a more just South African society.

This is an erudite analysis of ten well-known South African writers, spanning the apartheid and post-apartheid era: Miriam Tlali, Lauretta Ngcobo, Farida Karodia, Agnes Sam, Sindiwe Magona, Zoe Wicomb, Rayda Jacobs, Yvette Christianse, Kagiso Lesego Molope and Zukiswa Wanner. Boswell argues that black women's fiction could and should be read as a subversive site of knowledge production in a setting, which, for centuries, denied black women's voices and intellects.

Reading their fiction as theory, for the first time these writers' works are placed in sustained conversation with each other, producing an arc of feminist criticism that speaks forcefully back to the abuse of a racist, white-dominated, patriarchal power.

"Claire is less cynical. ‘Fall in love, if you must. But do your research. And meet his people early on. They’ll give you a sense of who he is.’ Solid advice. And ultimately, this is how I found myself on a flight to Bloemfontein one Friday afternoon."

An instant classic, the lies and betrayals of love and party politics are told in gorgeous prose with an ear for our time’s intimate and public language.

The Comrade’s Wife follows a turbulent marriage between a rising politician and an academic, told through her life and lens.

*Winner of the UJ Debut Prize*

Family secrets run deep for Grace, a young girl growing up in Cape Town during the 1980s, spilling over into adulthood, and threating to ruin the respectable life she has built for herself.

When an old childhood friend reappears, Grace’s memories of her childhood come rushing back, and she is confronted, once again, with the loss that has shaped her. The novel is permeated with the long shadow cast by personal trauma, violence and loss on people’s lives.

Family secrets run deep for Grace, a young girl growing up in Cape Town during the 1980s. Her family secrets spill over into adulthood, and threaten to ruin the respectable life she has built for herself. When an old childhood friend emerges after disappearing a decade earlier during a clash with apartheid riot police in the Cape Flats, where South Africa’s coloured community makes its home, Grace’s memories of her childhood come rushing back, and she is confronted, once again, with the loss that has shaped her. She has to face up to the truth or continue to live a lie—but the choice is not straightforward. Unmaking Grace is an intimate portrayal of violence, both personal and political, and its legacy on one person’s life. It meditates on the long shadow cast by personal trauma, showing the inter-generational imprint of violence and loss on people’s lives.

Lauretta Ngcobo's death in November 2015 robbed South Africa and the African continent of a significant literary talent, freedom fighter, and feminist voice. Born in 1931 in Ixopo in the then Natal Province, South Africa Ngcobo was one of three pioneering black South African women writers - the first to publish novels in English from the particular vantage point of black women. Along with Bessie Head and Miriam Tlali, Ngcobo showed the world, through her fiction, what it was like to be black and a woman in apartheid South Africa.

Where Alan Paton's Cry, The Beloved Country (1948) rendered African women "silent, with the patient suffering of black women, with the suffering of oxen, with the suffering of any that are mute," Ngcobo imagined women characters fully and gloriously human in their complexity.

Her first novel, Cross of Gold, was published in England in 1981, after she had left South Africa as a member of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) for exile first in Swaziland, then Tanzania, and finally, England. Drawing on her experiences of harassment by the apartheid regime, the novel followed the fate of Mandla, a young political activist whose mother, Sindisiwe, dies in the novel's first chapter.

Feminist critique that the novel's only strong woman character died too early, forced Ngcobo to reflect on the politics of representation in her work. Stung by the criticism around Sindisiwe's death, Ngcobo set out to write a second novel in which the women would not only survive, but be strong and powerful agents of history. The result was And They Didn't Die (1990), a novel that has staked out a place as an African feminist classic alongside Buchi Emecheta's The Joys of Motherhood (1979), Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions (1988), Bessie Head's A Question of Power (1974) and Nawal El Sadaawi's Woman at Point Zero (1975).

And They Didn't Die is path-breaking in its portrayal of the experiences of a black woman that gives its main character, Jezile, an interiority and a voice rarely seen in South African literature before this novel's publication. It is singular in highlighting the damaging, overlapping intersectional effects of apartheid and customary law on the lives of African women confined to apartheid Bantustans. In this novel, Ngcobo deftly illustrates the ways in which African women are positioned between these two oppressive systems, with devastating effects on their own and their children's lives.

Ngcobo was also a cultural activist determined to nurture the talents of other marginalised women writers. In exile, she edited the collection of essays, Let it Be Told: Black Women Writers in Britain (1987), and upon her return to South Africa, Prodigal Daughters Stories of Women in Exile (2012). She also authored the children's book, Fikile Learns to Like Other People (1994). This new addition to the Voices of Liberation, Lauretta Ngcobo: Writing as the practice of freedom, serves as of a mapping of Ngcobo's life, as well as some of her key texts. It is divided into three broad categories: 1) Her Life, 2)Her Voice and 3) Her Legacy.

"Barbara's vivid and dramatic stories, told with a wicked sense of humor, will make you laugh out loud. She definitely gets what living with rescued dogs (nine of them ) is all about. This book will inspire you with the couple's unstinting love, devotion, and respect for dogs as family members. You'll be glad to include it in your treasured collection of great dog books." --Allen and Linda Anderson, authors of Dogs and the Women Who Love Them (named in O Magazine as one of the top books of 2010) When Barbara meets her future husband, Ray, it is love-and dog-at first sight. Over the course of thirty-two years, seventeen relocations and nine dogs, their mutual love of dogs guides them on their unconventional path. The love that Barbara and Ray get in return is literally lifesaving, with one dog attacking a lethal intruder and another discovering Barbara's cancer. Her own survival story underscores the story of how her dogs become survivors themselves. Each new dog adds its own dynamic to the family, sometimes upending it. From Turbo (whose Spock-like ears may have provided super powers), Barbara learns about the will to live; Lexington demonstrates incredible patience and an inexplicable love of golf; Madison teaches that laughter is truly the best medicine and that the whole "nine lives thing" is not reserved just for cats; Morgan should be sainted for tolerating Izzy, who is as cute as she is bad. Barbara is certain that somewhere in doggie heaven there is a poster that says "If you are sick, injured or in need of really expensive medical care, FIND THESE HUMANS "