Gina knows hardly anything about her father apart from the fact that he was once engaged to Koringa, a crocodile tamer, and that he is buried in an unmarked grave. In between shifts at a call centre, with Doubt always looking over her shoulder, she works on a novel about him, ultimately drawing back the curtain on a complex, sad but also funny and enchanting life.

A story about love, family, fear and the banishing of fear: a celebration of strong women and a defence of a ‘nervous’ man.

When a strike by the University of Adamastor’s technical staff coincides with a lull in sound operator Vida’s employment, she agrees to stage-manage a university event. There she meets the Head of Effective Communication, Simon Landor. He is caught up in a massive student protest and his communication is anything but effective. Vida, who rescues strays, whether pets or people, steps in. A host of engaging characters populate this novel exploring communication and connection in a complex world.

Poet John Carson lives in a crumbling seaside house with his sister and niece. Winter is upon him, and he writes feverishly to the woman who has abandoned him as a lover yet kept him as a correspondent. Theresa: beautiful, generous . . . and married. 'Will John and Theresa find a way to overcome everything that holds them apart or is a state of permanent longing, in fact,  really what poets need?

In this award-winning novel, Finuala Dowling explores the fleeting and often so complicated moments of happiness in any household. Margot is a late-night talk radio host – the perfect job for an outspoken insomniac. Her home in Kalk Bay is crowded with wonderfully evocative characters such as her teenage daughter, Pia, and the three men in their lives. Finally there’s her mother, Zoe, once the acclaimed author of a quirky self-help volume with the same title, but now increasingly senile.

Pretend You Don’t Know Me brings together in one volume the best of Finuala Dowling’s funny, poignant and idiosyncratic poetry from four earlier prize-winning collections, with a section devoted to new poems.

This new collection contains her iconic poem ‘To the doctor who treated the raped baby and who felt such despair’ as well as Dowling’s tragi-comic cycle of poems on the theme of her mother’s dementia, and the hugely popular poems ‘Butter’ and ‘The abuse of cauliflowers’. At the heart of the book are the funny and poignant connections we make with other people, and the lifelong effort to stay whole.

‘Pretend You Don’t Know Me, by South African Finuala Dowling, is a witty and wise collection of new and selected poems. Her sequence about her mother’s dementia is very touching. Elsewhere, these vital works will have you crying with laughter.’ – Jackie Kay, The Guardian (Books of the Year 2018)

Pretend You Don't Know Me brings together in one volume the best of Finuala Dowling's funny, poignant and idiosyncratic poetry from four earlier prize-winning collections, with a section devoted to new poems. It introduces this popular South African poet to a UK audience. Finuala Dowling's debut collection, I flying, published in 2002, was an instant success in her native South Africa. Its accessibility, humanity and wit, as well as its beguilingly honest stories of home, parenthood, love, loss and desperation, won many new converts to poetry. The volume went into multiple printings, and won the Ingrid Jonker prize. Dowling's subsequent collections, Doo-Wop Girls of the Universe and Notes from the Dementia Ward (winners of the SANLAM and Olive Schreiner prizes respectively), consolidated her reputation as an inventive sketcher of the domestic sublime. Her chapbook, Change is possible, sold out at the 2014 Aldeburgh Poetry Festival. Pretend You Don't Know Me contains her iconic poem 'To the doctor who treated the raped baby and who felt such despair' as well as Dowling's tragi-comic cycle of poems on the theme of her mother's dementia, and the hugely popular poems 'Butter', 'I am the Zebra', 'To adventurers, as far as I'm concerned' and 'The abuse of cauliflowers'. At the heart of the book are the funny and poignant connections we make with other people, and the lifelong effort to stay whole.

"If all the ladies should know about spectroscopes and cathode rays, who will attend to the buttons and breakfasts?" "Asked of Wellesley astronomy professor Sarah Whiting by a male colleague in the 1880s."

"I agreed to read this manuscript as a favor. It was another chore in a week already overburdened by professional and personal duties. But I was riveted by the stories, the emotions, the glimpses into women's lives. Women like me and unlike me, with stories I identified with, and those I didn't. I read it in one afternoon, like fiction.Ifind that I know each of these women, most of whom I've never met. And hell, I'm proud of them."
--Jo-Anne Richards, University of the Witswatersrand

The Wits WonderWoman are a group of academics at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. "Buttons and Breakfasts" is a collection of their writings and reflections on growing up in a man's world, and working in an environment peopled by male professors. There are journeys here from dusty township to dental school, from dropout to doctorate. There are testimonies of careers kept aloft through sexual harassment cases, pregnancies, cancer, marital breakup, and personal despair.

In these pages, the secret lives of women academics come to light the sacrifices they've made in their passionate commitment to their chosen discipline and to their students. Sometimes profoundly solitary, sometimes bolstered by the sisterhood, sometimes warrior-like and sometimes weeping, they've crossed borders and boundaries of the academic and the personal unknown. From moving tales of grandmothers and mothers to irreverent satires of university life, the pieces in this book offer an explicit counter-narrative.

The collection is eclectic and quirky, it is a book to dip into and savor in fragments. It will offer resonance for other academic women, cautionary and inspirational tales for young women planning a career, and some startling insights for men who wonder what women "really" are thinking. The collection includes a number of illustrations (including an academic board game) and a photo-essay capturing the mysterious and unseen spaces of university life.

"Margaret Orr" and "Mary Rorich" are professors at the University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa). "Finuala Dowling" is a published poet and author of the novel "What Poets Need."