The true and epic story of a boy's survival in the face of impossible odds. Walk tells the story of a deadly scramble down the wild coastline of what would become present-day South Africa and should be required reading for anyone interested in the early history of this complex nation and impeccably crafted literary fiction alike. This length of coastline is a hike that every South African should have the privilege of taking. But for the survivors of the wreck of the Grosvenor as they clambered onto the rocks on 5 August 1782, they might as well have crash-landed on Mars. The shipwrecked decided to walk to the Cape of Good Hope, though their ordeal starting at Lambasi in northern Pondoland ended in the dune deserts not far from what we now know as Port Elizabeth - for those few who survived it. Walk takes the reader, step by step, day by day, on William Hubberly's horrific trek. While indisputably fiction, Walk sails a good deal closer to the historical truth than most nonfiction you will read and is a haunting parable on the meeting of Europe and Africa.

The book of war tells the story of a boy who comes to manhood in a war. William Kentridge has called it, "a rare feast", and Rian Malan, "a very good book, possibly great." An illiterate European child is stranded on the southern tip of Africa. The British and the Xhosa have been spilling each other's blood for eighty years and the kid signs up for the conflict in the hope of steady meals and a few shillings a month. The kid's new commander, The Captain, is hardly more than a boy himself, but he has money and education behind him. His goal is to prove that the revolutionary Minie Rifle is the most effective killing machine available to the British Empire. His instruments are an assortment of convicts, sailors and drunkards culled from the port at the Cape of Good Hope; his adversary, a strategically brilliant Xhosa general with little left to lose. The Captain and the irregulars depart on a journey towards a grotesque denouement around a copper vat on the slopes of Mount Misery. They move through a landscape prowled by wild beasts, a landscape so savage that the mountains themselves are like "ancient artefacts whose listed purpose is slaughter". As they travel, the distinction between man and animal becomes increasingly blurred. Although it is based closely on first-hand accounts of the 8th Xhosa War, the book creates the effect of an intense defamiliarisation of a history educated South Africans will believe themselves to be au fait with. It converts the bare facts of times past into something terrible and strange. Anyone who has asked themselves why South Africa is a violent country will find a disturbing answer in The Book of War.