Making sure the end of the world never happens again – that is Enver Eleven’s task. A spy for the Historical Agency, Enver is based in Johannesburg, the only city to survive – thanks to its mining tunnels – when a supernova hit.

In Enver’s Joburg, time-travelling agents jump between the past and future, searching for an elusive enemy plotting against the Agency. Enver’s mission starts off on shaky ground: when his mentor Shanumi Six disappears, Enver must prove that he is no double agent, an allegation as frightening as a white skin in a world where it has become vanishingly rare.

But if you could go back and change the past, would the future turn out the way you want it to? Imraan Coovadia’s dazzlingly original A Spy In Time is an extraordinary tale for extraordinary times.

The Poisoners is a history of four devastating chapters in the making of the region, seen through the disturbing use of toxins and accusations of poisoning circulated by soldiers, spies, and politicians in Zimbabwe and South Africa.

Imraan Coovadia’s fascinating new book exposes the secret use of poisons and diseases in the Rhodesian bush war and independent Zimbabwe, and the apparent connection to the 2001 anthrax attacks in the United States; the enquiry into the chemical and biological warfare programme in South Africa known as Project Coast, discovered through the arrest and failed prosecution of Dr Wouter Basson; the use of toxic compounds such as Virodene to treat patients at the height of the Aids epidemic in South Africa, and the insistence of the government that proven therapies like Nevirapine, which could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives, were in fact poisons; and the history of poisoning and accusations of poisoning in the modern history of the African National Congress, from its guerrilla camps in Angola to Jacob Zuma’s suggestion that his fourth wife collaborated with a foreign intelligence agency to have him murdered.

But The Poisoners is not merely a book of history. It is also a meditation, by a most perceptive commentator, on the meaning of race, on the unhappy history of black and white in southern Africa, and on the nature of good and evil.

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.

What does Playboy have to do with Nabokov’s infamous novel Lolita and his obsession with a butterfly? Why is Shrien Dewani looking so cheap? And what can Ovid's Metamorphosis show us about contemporary South African society? Imraan Coovadia's Transformations is a collection of short pieces in the tradition of the essayist: exciting, probing, intelligent and readable. The essays are on writing, politics and culture from a South African perspective. Written with his signature wit, and with subjects ranging from vuvuzelas to J M Coetzee, Tolstoy to Mbeki, Coovadia's essays cast a wide net and, like literature and the country, never fail to surprise.

"On the borders there were new guerrilla armies. The rouble and the dollar had replaced the pound sterling. The kilometre and the kilogram and the litre were new ways of measuring miles and imperial pounds and fluid ounces. In Zaire, Patrice Lumumba had been murdered on the instruction of the White House...?The measurements made by Curzon College were as outdated as yards and inches. They didn't know what counted."In Tales of the Metric System, Imraan Coovadia's sere, direct sentences light a fire as he parses South Africa across the decades, from 1970 into the present. As Salman Rushdie used Indian independence in Midnight's Children, Coovadia takes his homeland's transition from imperial to metric measurements as his catalyst, holding South Africa up to the light and examining it from multiple perspectives. An elite white housewife married to a radical intellectual; a rock guitarist; the same guitarist's granddaughter thirty years later; a teenaged boy at the mercy of mob justice?-?each story takes place over one of ten days across the decades, and each protagonist has his own stakes, her own moment in time, but each is equally caught in the eddies of change. Tales of the Metric System is clear eyed, harrowing, and formally daring.

"On the borders there were new guerrilla armies. The rouble and the dollar had replaced the pound sterling. The kilometre and the kilogram and the litre were new ways of measuring miles and imperial pounds and fluid ounces. In Zaire, Patrice Lumumba had been murdered on the instruction of the White House...?The measurements made by Curzon College were as outdated as yards and inches. They didn't know what counted."In Tales of the Metric System, Imraan Coovadia's sere, direct sentences light a fire as he parses South Africa across the decades, from 1970 into the present. As Salman Rushdie used Indian independence in Midnight's Children, Coovadia takes his homeland's transition from imperial to metric measurements as his catalyst, holding South Africa up to the light and examining it from multiple perspectives. An elite white housewife married to a radical intellectual; a rock guitarist; the same guitarist's granddaughter thirty years later; a teenaged boy at the mercy of mob justice?-?each story takes place over one of ten days across the decades, and each protagonist has his own stakes, her own moment in time, but each is equally caught in the eddies of change. Tales of the Metric System is clear eyed, harrowing, and formally daring.

The dangers of political violence and the possibilities of non-violence were the central themes of three lives which changed the twentieth century-Leo Tolstoy, writer and aristocrat who turned against his class, Mohandas Gandhi who corresponded with Tolstoy and considered him the most important person of the time, and Nelson Mandela, prisoner and statesman, who read War and Peace on Robben Island and who, despite having led a campaign of sabotage, saw himself as a successor to Gandhi. Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Mandela tried to create transformed societies to replace the dying forms of colony and empire. They found the inequalities of Russia, India, and South Africa intolerable yet they questioned the wisdom of seizing the power of the state, creating new kinds of political organisation and imagination to replace the old promises of revolution. Their views, along with their ways of leading others, are closely connected, from their insistence on working with their own hands and reforming their individual selves to their acceptance of death. On three continents, in a century of mass mobilization and conflict, they promoted strains of nationalism devoid of antagonism, prepared to take part in a general peace. Looking at Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Mandela in sequence, taking into account their letters and conversations as well as the institutions they created or subverted, placing at the centre their treatment of the primal fantasy of political violence, this volume reveals a vital radical tradition which stands outside the conventional categories of twentieth-century history and politics.