Pollution doesn't make for easy sonnets or flowing, romantic narratives. And that's what this title is about - pollution. Not the everyday sort of pollution that we recognise so easily, the type which piles up into stinking heaps of litter or that clogs the sky with filthy smoke. No, this is a form of pollution which is so subtle and insidious that many people do not realise it is there. Invaded is about biological pollution, the kind that comes in dense hedges of lush greenery, blooming fields of heady petals or gracefully draped creepers. It may spread incognito on the wings of a bird, tug on the end of an angler's line or scurry unnoticed through the undergrowth. These pages explore plants and animals that have traversed the borders and boundaries of their natural habitats and made their way into South Africa over the past 300 years and more. Unhindered by the predators and diseases which once kept their populations in check, many have come to outnumber and out-compete the species they encounter in their adopted homes. Invaded provides an overview of the different species that have arrived in our country during the past three centuries, and the threats they pose (or have the potential to become). Ultimately, the book attempts to quantify how these species have changed systems, disrupted the natural environment and threatened the future of the country's many unique plants, animals and habitats.

The food we eat is as diverse as the cultures and lifestyles of the people consuming it. But the issues underlying food run much deeper than the whims of our cultures or palates. Until now, the subject of food security has mostly been viewed as a rural issue, with research and development work honing in on subsistence farming. But with the massive influx into cities, the focus needs to shift to the metropolis. The hungry season takes science writer Leonie Joubert and photographer Eric Miller to eight different cities and towns around southern Africa as they explore the complex issues around food security, including: Childhood stunting and malnutrition; The transition from traditional ‘African’ to ‘Western’ diets; Chronic lifestyle-related illnesses associated with a modern diet; Nutritional literacy, behaviour and choices; Large-scale food production and urban food gardens; Poverty, joblessness and the geography of the city; Urban planning, supermarkets and the full food value chain; and food wastage. Ultimately, The Hungry Season looks at the crisis of hunger and malnutrition surrounding us in the city, hidden behind layers of affluence and comfort. It tackles the fundamental question: Why is it that in southern Africa we produce enough calories and nutrients to keep the region full, satisfied and well nourished, and yet we still have such high levels of hunger and malnutrition?

When you tug on a single thing in nature, said the conservationist John Muir, you find it is attached to the rest of the world. Nowhere is this more evident than in the climate crisis. Tugging on a thread of our shared atmosphere in China or the U.S., for example, by shunting pollution into the skies, causes the fabric of local weather patterns to unravel half a world away. Climate change is the biggest moral problem of our time, as people who have contributed little to the pollution responsible for global warming are increasingly understood to be most vulnerable to the shifting environment around them. In Boiling Point, Leonie Joubert embarks on a journey in which she explores the lives of some South Africans affected by this phenomenon: a rooibos tea farmer in the Northern Cape, a traditional fisherman in Lamberts Bay, a farmer in the center of the Free States maize belt, a political refugee in Pietermaritzburg and a sangoma in Limpopo mining country. Most of these communities live on a knife-edge because of poverty and their dependence on an already capricious natural environment. Boiling Point considers what might happen to them as normal weather trends are amplified in a hotter world.

"Scorched" is a vivid journey through southern Africa's mesmerizing landscapes as climate change sets in. It wanders through the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands to capture the last faltering calls of a rain frog that was named after the hobbit Bilbo Baggins. The author pauses for thought following an elephant stampede to consider how savannahs might shift in an altered climate. She trails the wading birds of the West Coast into the high Arctic tundra for their annual breeding season before returning to a Cape which is crisping over as drought continues to grip the province. Another world exists somewhere beyond the global politicking of superpowers and petrostates.

This is the place where a solitary bee continues to pollinate the pale, demure flower of an orchid near Darling, or where the limey coral skeleton hosts its colorful algae on a Sodwana reef. These plants and animals many of which are unique to the region continue to do what their ancestors have done for millions of years. Yet the world is shifting its shape around them. In places it is warming and drying, elsewhere the rains come in greater deluges. Some are abandoned by the other plants and animals with which they have cohabited, as species retreat before the onslaught of rising greenhouse gases and altered weather patterns.

"Scorched" marvels at the world in which we live: the improbable balance of the air round us and the way it banks away the Sun's energy to keep us warm and thriving, the way life has evolved in this planetary incubator and how one species has risen up to become a potent geophysical force with the ability to shift a system which has evolved over 4600 million years.

"Scorched" gives powerful local color to a global problem. It ponders the morality of the changes humankind has wrought, and the future of life as we know it.

"Leonie S. Joubert" studied journalism and history at the universities of Rhodes (South Africa) and Stellenbosch (South Africa). It was her enduring fascination with the human condition and its place in the natural order of things that led her to take up science writing from a small study in Wynberg, overlooking the Cape peninsula.