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.

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.

"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.

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.

Jan Wentzel, verhaleredakteur van Die voorpunt, kry te make met Marié Hurter, ’n aspirant-skrywer wat maar net nie wíl aanvaar dat haar liefdesverhaal afgekeur is nie. Jan het hoë ideale en neem sy werk ernstig op, maar ’n probleem ontstaan. Hoe gemaak as hy nou ook ’n ogie op Marié het? Of voer dié ondeunde rooikop iets in die mou?

In Die rooikop en die redakteur en ander stories bring H&R vroeë verhale deur een van Afrikaans se belangrikste skrywers in een band byeen. Vóór die Sestiger-beweging, etlike literêre pryse en internasionale aansien het André Brink sy loopbaan begin as skrywer van humoristiese stories en spannings- en liefdesverhale in gesinstydskrifte. Die vermaaklike stories in dié bundel het gedurende die 50's in die tydskrifte Die huisgenoot en Die brandwag verskyn. Dié bundel kombineer Brink se eiesoortige sin vir humor met ’n tikkie nostalgie – perfek vir ’n ouer én nuwe geslag lesers. Saamgestel deur Cecilia van Zyl, voormalige verhaleredakteur van Die huisgenoot.

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.

"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.