As a teenager, Fred Khumalo greeted his friends with a handshake and the words "touch my blood". It implied friendship and trust. The saying became his name. More than that, it became the way he viewed the world. Everything touched Fred Khumalo. Twice he was bewitched. Twice his father - the "country bumpkin" - took him to inyangas to have the "demons" banished. Twice his mother - the "city girl" - took him to a doctor to have the "fevers" cured. He smoked dagga with conmen and criminals, he pickpocketed "corpses" on the Friday night trains and worked as a gardener in the larney suburbs. He studied journalism and shacked up with whiteys in a commune, for a while the only darkie in a crazy swirl of booze, drugs and sex. And then the bloody fighting that tore apart KwaZulu/Natal in the 1980s touched his life and sucked him into a place of horror and violence that threatened to destroy him. When a friend died in his arms with the worlds "They really got me, Touch my blood. They really got me", Khumalo realised that if he was to outlive the madness, he had to run. From the journalist and Sunday Times columnist comes a startlingly honest, humorous and poignant autobiography about growing up in a time of laughter and heartache.

This is a story of twin boys – identical in appearance but in nothing else. Ashraf is all rage and action – a lover of the real. Firoze is a dreamer and reader - a lover of the ideal. The Dawood family is from Muslim Fordsburg. The father (formally at least) is a merchant and the mother a part-time philosophy lecturer at Wits. Their uncle, known universally as Ten-Per-Cent, lives in the house and shares the ginger-beer factory business with his brother. The story begins in Johannesburg but ends in the US. Ashraf is jailed in Fort Dix Prison in Texas, and Firoze is just settling in New York with his new young wife. Among the cast of characters are Mohammed Atta (of 9/11 notoriety), George Bush, a Pakistani Brigadier in Peshawar, a host of lawyers and assorted crooks of one kind or another, plus various Korean massage parlour girls. Firoze is the narrator and he tells the story while in prison – before finally tricking Ashraf into changing places. The story offers itself as an unconventional family memoir that tells the story of the fortunes of a family of crooks – the green-eyed thieves. The mother is an accomplished shoplifter; the father a master of all forms of theft – including all the suits of the Aga Khan who happened to be the same size as Dawood senior. Firoze, the sophisticated dreamer, is not much good at thieving but Ashraf lives for little else.

Eleven-year-old Nolitye lives in Phola, on the outskirts of Johannesburg, where children have been mysteriously disappearing. Her best friends are Bheki - overweight and timid - and bespectacled Four Eyes, who leaves the Spoilers, a gang under the leadership of Rotten Nellie. At first, the story centres on the threesome's efforts to survive victimisation at the hands of Four Eyes' former gang. But when Nolitye picks up a magic stone, the intrigue shifts to a magical realm that co-exists with ours. It soon becomes clear that Nolitye, who has always taken comfort in her granny's words, "you mess with a woman, you mess with a rock", is the new seeker for the five pieces of the magic stone which, when restored, will heal communities and bring them together again. In a dream, Nolitye learns that her father, once a healer and believed to have died in a mining accident, is being held captive in the underworld and that the woman whom she believes to be her mother is really a witch in the service of Ncitjana, the Evil One. Nolitye then embarks on a quest to find the missing pieces of the stone and to rescue her parents.

A young Zulu boy named Dumisani grows up in awe of the legendary figure of Nelson Mandela. He thinks of Mandela not only as a great leader of the oppressed, but also as a great seducer of women, and it is in this aspect that he decides to emulate Mandela. A woman he has been pursuing for a long time yields to his advances the day the Black Pimpernel is captured. But Mandela's imprisonment renders Dumisani impotent for 27 years.

The taboos within the tidal moods of the menopause are described with an anger and a verbal intensity that are uniquely Krog s. Close relationships are searingly explored, occasionally in a confrontational way, more often searching for resolution. In the final meditative section, Table Mountain, a looming, symbolic and androgynous godhead is contemplated as an abiding presence and witness to the transience of human life. These dramatic, even reckless poems, reaffirm Antjie Krog s status and bring an altogether new and unique energy to South African English-language poetry.Antjie Krog s iconic status as one of South Africa s most popular and critically acclaimed poets began when she was eighteen, with her first collection, Dogter van Jefta (1970). Almost four decades later, this very different collection will confirm her reputation with poems that blur and ravage the boundaries between the lyrical and confessional, the private and public. From Body Bereft, p.62fossil alphabetthe found fossil does not describehow my blue eyes look past your eyeshow your black eyes look away from my eyeshow my white forearm does not simply rest next to your black forearmhow my sleek hair sleeps next to your frizzy hairthe fossil does however describe in the finest vertebraehow the coast blindingly kept on shouting after the continent that once was part of herhow the fynbos undisputedly sniffed for her torn-away friendshow the rusted rock along the coast longed for the drifted bloodbrotherbut the fossil knows that once everything was linkedthat we broached our hearts for one anotheronly we don t know why we now sit with this stoney one-nessand so much furious aversion "

'n Vreeslose en ekstatiese verkenning van 'n bewussyn wat aftakeling en verweer in die oog staar. In 'n stem eie aan Krog word die taboes in die verskuiwende gemoedstoestande van die menopouse met woede en verbale intensiteit beskryf. Intieme verhoudings word skreiend eerlik ondersoek. In die laaste, meer bepeinsende gedeelte word die intens persoonlike getemper. Die fokus verskuif na Tafelberg – 'n alomteenwoordigee, durende teenwoordigheid wat oor vier jaargetye waargeneem word; die onnaspeurlike getuie van verandering, maar ironies ook 'n spieel van die self en persoonlike pyn.