In a telegram dated 29 April 1963, thirty-year-old Afrikaans poet Ingrid Jonker thanks André Brink, a young novelist of twenty-eight, for flowers and a letter he sent her. In the more than two hundred letters that followed this telegram, one of South African literature’s most famous love affairs unfolds. Jonker’s final letter to Brink is dated 18 April 1965. She drowned herself in the ocean at Three Anchor Bay three months later.

More than fifty years on, this poignant, often stormy relationship still grips readers’ imaginations.

In December 2014, three months before his death on 6 February 2015, André Brink offered these never-before-seen letters, as well as personal photographs, for publication.

"The novel, Brink argues, is not about representation but the self-conscious play of language. From its inception, he suggests, the genre has been about the act of writing and self-reflection. This thesis is not new but is part of the currency of postmodern literary theory. Brink, himself a noted South African novelist, the author of some 12 books, including "A Dry White Season" (1984), and a university professor, brings the insight of an insider. He surveys 15 celebrated novels, historically arranged from "Don Quixote" and "La Princesse de Cleves" to A.S. Byatt's "Possession" and Italo Calvino's "If on a Winter Night a Traveller" examining each in terms of its play with writing and language. His discussions are marked by clarity, insight, and comprehension. A valuable book."
"--Thomas L. Cooksey, Library Journal"

"What a treat to explore the novel as a genre through the lucid eyes of AndrA(c) Brink, himself one of the world's foremost novelists! I particularly enjoyed the way in which the most traditional novels were revealed as contemporary and entirely relevant."
"--Ariel Dorfman"

The postmodernist novel has become famous for the extremes of its narcissistic involvement with language. In this challenging and wide-ranging new study, AndrA(c) Brink argues that this self-consciousness has been a defining characteristic of the novel since its inception. Taking as his starting point "the propensity for story" embedded in all language, he demonstrates that the old familiar novels may be the more startlingly modern, while postmodernist texts remain more firmly rooted in convention.

From the beginnings of the genre with Don Quixote, through "classic" novels of theeighteenth and nineteenth centuries and modern and postmodern texts of the twentieth, Brink performs a sweeping analysis of 500 years of the novel, including "Moll Flanders," "Emma," "Madame Bovary," "The Trial," "One Hundred Years of Solitude," and "Possession," As an internationally recognized novelist, he brings a unique critical eye and enthusiasm to his exploration of the genre, offering the reader a refreshing and rewarding introduction to the novel and narrative theory.

Op 29 April 1963 stuur die 29-jarige digter Ingrid Jonker ’n telegram aan André P. Brink. Sy bedank die 27-jarige skrywer vir blomme en ’n brief wat hy aan haar besorg het. In die meer as tweehonderd skrywes wat hierna tussen die twee volg, ontvou sekerlik die bekendste liefdesverhouding in die Afrikaanse literêre geskiedenis. Jonker se finale brief aan Brink is gedateer 18 April 1965 – drie maande voordat sy die see in loop by Drieankerbaai.

’n Halfeeu later word lesers se verbeelding steeds aangegryp deur die hartstog van dié teer, dikwels stormagtige verhouding.

In Desember 2014, drie maande voor sy dood, het André P. Brink die liefdesbriewe tussen hom en Ingrid Jonker vir publikasie aangebied. Die briewe is nog nooit voorheen gepubliseer nie en sluit onbekende persoonlike foto’s in.

In a telegram dated 29 April 1963, thirty-year-old Afrikaans poet Ingrid Jonker thanks Andre Brink, a young novelist of twenty-eight, for flowers and a letter he sent her. In the more than two hundred letters that followed this telegram, one of South African literature’s most famous love affairs unfolds. Jonker’s final letter to Brink is dated 18 April 1965. She drowned herself in the ocean at Three Anchor Bay three months later. More than fifty years on, this poignant, often stormy relationship still grips readers’ imaginations. In December 2014, three months before his death on 6 February 2015, Andre Brink offered these never-before-seen letters, as well as personal photographs, for publication. “Don’t, for God’s sake, Ingrid, go ahead with what you wanted to do in Jan [Rabie]’s house. I don’t have, nor do I want, any reasonable grounds to persuade you. Perhaps I’m urging you purely for my own selfish considerations. But don’t. You should still ‘make’ poems like ‘Begin somer’, ‘Dood van ’n maagd’, ‘Bitterbessie dagbreek’, ‘Art poetique’, the series ‘Intieme gesprekkies’; and we should again ‘make’ that which you can’t ‘make’ in Afrikaans: love.” – AB, 21 April 1963. “You should really not call the book Die ambassadeur. No one will buy it … it’s such a dusty old title.” – IJ, 1 May 1963. “Do you think it wise to visit Bartho [Smit] and Stephen [Etienne le Roux] together (the two of us together)? In any case, I won’t stop you – I’m just interested! Because when I received your beautiful letter, I treated the matter as a hot top secret. To date, Juliana Bouws is the only one who knows – I had to tell someone!” – IJ, 20 November 1964.

As startling and powerful as when first published more than two decades ago, Andre Brink's classic novel, "A Dry White Season," is an unflinching and unforgettable look at racial intolerance, the human condition, and the heavy price of morality.

Ben Du Toit is a white schoolteacher in suburban Johannesburg in a dark time of intolerance and state-sanctioned apartheid. A simple, apolitical man, he believes in the essential fairness of the South African government and its policies&#8212until the sudden arrest and subsequent "suicide" of a black janitor from Du Toit's school. Haunted by new questions and desperate to believe that the man's death was a tragic accident, Du Toit undertakes an investigation into the terrible affair&#8212a quest for the truth that will have devastating consequences for the teacher and his family, as it draws him into a lethal morass of lies, corruption, and murder.

Ben du Toit is an ordinary, decent, harmless man, unremarkable in every way - until his sense of justice is outraged by the death of a man he has known. His friend died at the hands of the police. In the beginning it appears a straightforward matter, an unfortunate error that can be explained and put right. But as Ben investigates further he finds that his curiosity becomes labelled rebellion - and for a rebel there is no way back.

Flip Lochner is a weary and disillusioned newspaper crime reporter. Curious to find out more about the origins of a casual acquaintance, he descends into Devil's Valley where, like Dante's Virgil, he encounters a bewildering array of mysterious characters and events that lead him to reevaluate the world in which he lives and which he thought he knew. Fusing invention and reality, magic realism and earthy humour, Lochner's adventures in the valley centre around the journey he undertakes to discover the truth about the elusive and erotic figure of Emma, one of Brink's most remarkable creations.

Andre Brink grew up in the deep interior of South Africa, as his magistrate father moved from one dusty dorp to the next. With searing honesty he describes his conflicting experiences of growing up in a world where innocence was always surrounded by violence. From an early age he found in storytelling the means of reconciling the stark contrasts - between religion and play-acting, between the breathless discovery of a girl called Maureen and the merciless beating of a black boy, between a meeting with a dwarf who lived in a hole in the ground and an encounter with a magician who threatened to teach him what he hadn't bargained for. While living in Paris in the sixties his discovery of a wider artistic life, allied to the exhilaration of the student uprising of 1968, confirmed in him the desire to become a writer.At the same time the tragedy of Sharpeville crystallised his growing political awareness and sparked the decision to return home and oppose the apartheid establishment with all his strength. This resulted in years of harassment by the South African secret police, in censorship, and in fractured relationships with many people close to him.Equally it led to extraordinary friendships sealed by meetings with leaders of the ANC in exile in both Africa and Europe. Andre Brink tells the story of a life lived in tumultuous times. His long love affair with music, art, the theatre, literature and sport illuminate this memoir as do relationships with remarkable women, among them the poet Ingrid Jonker, who have shared and shaped his life, and encounters with people like Ariel Dorfman, Anna Netrebko, Nadine Gordimer, Gunter Grass, Beyers Naude, Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela. Above all, "A Fork in the Road" is a love song to the country where he was born, and where, despite its recent troubles and tragedies, he still lives.

"Brink blends history with invention and African myth . . . This bloody fable, rooted in bloody reality, is one of Brink's most powerful works."-"Los Angeles Times Book Review
Hanna X is a young German woman who wants to escape her tortured childhood by moving to her country's colony in South-West Africa. Upon arriving, however, she is confronted with the harsh realities of colonial life. For resisting the advances of a German officer, she is banished to Frauenstein, a phantasmagoric outpost that is at once a prison, nunnery, and brothel. When the drunken excesses of visiting soldiers threaten the young girl who has become her only companion, Hanna revolts.
Mounting a ragtag army of women and native victims of colonial brutality, she sets out on an epic journey to take on the German Reich. Combining the history of colonialism with the myths of Africa, this is an exquisitely written tale of suffering, violence, revenge, and love.
Andre Brink has won South Africa's major literary prize, the CAN, three times and has twice been short-listed for the Booker Prize. He lives in Cape Town, South Africa.

When Flip Lochner, a seedy, tired journalist fleeing a failed marriage, sees a beautiful woman with four breasts in Devil's Valley, he thinks it's a mirage. But then a man called Lukas Death stands before him. So begins Lochner's search for "the truth" first hinted at by a young student in Cape Town who was mysteriously killed. Lochner meets Lukas Death's clan, where righteousness prevails by day and depravity by night, where punishment for misdemeanors is summary, yet brutal murderers walk unscathed. Nothing in Devil's Valley is as it seems: the supernatural is an ingredient of every day, the living and the dead are never quite separate, the grotesque coexists with the banal.
Vibrant and darkly humorous, "Devil's Valley" is splendid entertainment from a master storyteller.

When expatriate Afrikaner Kristien Muller hears of her grandmother's impending death, she ends her self-imposed exile in London and returns to the South Africa she thought she'd escaped. But irrevocable change is sweeping the land, and reality itself seems to be in flux as the country stages its first democratic elections. Kristien's Ouma Kristina herself is dying because of the upheavals: a terrorist attack on her isolated mansion has terminally injured her. As Kristien keeps vigil by her grandmother's sickbed, Ouma tells Kristien stories of nine generations of women in the family, stories in which myth and reality blur, in which legend and brute fact are confused, in which magic, treachery, farce, and heroism are the stuff of the day-to-day. Imaginings of Sand is the passionate tale of a nation discovering itself and of the women who pioneered that discovery.

In early 1749 a white woman and a black man are stranded together in the wilderness of the South African interior. She is an educated person, totally helpless in the wilds. He is a runaway slave. As they face the long trek back to civilization, a fellowship emerges between them.

&?Brink writes feelingly of South Africa-the land, the black, the white, the terrible beauty and tragedy that lies therein.&? -Publishers Weekly&
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Shortlisted for the Booker Prize?&
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An Instant in the Wind is the passionate story of an escaped slave and a white woman lost in the African wilderness, and the unexpected love that flowers between them.&
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&?Brink describes &?calamities and absurdities of the apartheid system with a cold lucidity that in no way interferes with high emotion and daring flights of the imagination.&?&?&
-Mario Vargas Llosa, New York Times Book Review&
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&?It is difficult to see how any South African novelist will be able to surpass the honesty of this novel or the real courage-both as artist and as [a] political man-which enabled Brink to write it.&?&
-World Literature Today&
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&?Andr?? Brink has gained a reputation in this country and in his native South Africa as a novelist unafraid to tackle the controversial subjects of mixed-race love affairs and marriages, of the injustices of apartheid, or racism in all its myriad forms.&?&
-Book World&
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&?The subject is important and the novelistic achievement impressive.&?&
-Library Journal&
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&?Tales of upper class women and primitive men combating the wilderness are nothing new. But I know of no other as honest, as beautifully told or as sad as this one.&?&
-Sunday Plain Dealer&
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&?An Instant in the Wind stands with the best of Alan Paton.&?&
-Cleveland Plain Dealer&
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Andr?? Brink is one of South Africa&'s most eminent novelists. He is the author of seventeen works of fiction, has been twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize and is anoutspoken recorder of South Africa&'s turbulent history, from the days of apartheid to the present.&

Soon there must come a day when I can say for myself: This and that I shall do, this and that I shall not. Philida is the mother of four children by Francois Brink, the son of her master. The year is 1832 and the Cape is rife with rumours about the liberation of the slaves. Philida decides to risk her whole life by lodging a complaint against Francois, who has reneged on his promise to set her free. His father has ordered him to marry a white woman from a prominent Cape Town family, and Philida will be sold on to owners in the harsh country up north. Unwilling to accept this fate, Philida continues to test the limits of her freedom, and with the Muslim slave Labyn she sets off on a journey across the great wilderness on the banks of the Gariep River, to the far north of Cape Town. "Philida" is an unforgettable story of one woman's determination to survive and be free.

Two new novellas, Mirror and Appassionata, are collected here with a third, The Blue Door (Umuzi, 2006), into one volume and thematically form a novel about the question: what other lives may we be living, and what if they connect? The result is a book which is at times reminscent of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled as it enters surreal and inexplicable worlds. In Mirror a successful Cape Town architect wakes up one morning to find the face of a black man staring back at him from his bathroom mirror. Shocked, he nevertheless begins his day, dreading the reactions of his wife, children and business partners. But no one seems to be aware of his metamorphosis. In The Blue Door an artist retreats to his studio cottage, to be greeted by a beautiful but unfamiliar woman and her daughters as if they were his family. When he returns to his real wife he cannot locate their apartment in the building where they have been living. In Appassionata an accompanist falls in love with a beautiful and brilliant soprano, but she forbids him any physical contact. Her former lover and accompanist have both recently died under suspect circumstances. But on a weekend away she, or someone else, comes to him at night.

`A massive apartheid thriller centred on a plot to blow up none other than the State President outside the gates of Cape Town Castle. . . Brink at his robust and imaginative best' - Adam Low, Daily Telegraph. A profound novel set in South Africa that combines compelling action with an intellectual confrontation of the author's poitically volatile home country. A brave masterpiece from Booker Prize shortlisted, award-winning author Andre Brink.