For the first time, K. Sello Duiker’s well-known The Hidden Star is now available in isiXhosa.

This is a book of questions and answers. But you already know what you want to ask, which is why you are reading. In fact, the truth is that you already know the answer to your question – you just have to listen to yourself.

Eleven-year-old Nolitye’s granny used to say: if you mess with a woman, you mess with a stone. When Nolitye finds a magical stone on the dusty streets of Phola, her granny’s words take on a new meaning. Along with her two friends – the somewhat pampered Bheki, and Four Eyes, a reformed member of the Spoilers gang led by Rotten Nellie – Nolitye puts the powers of the stone to good use: for the first time the threesome can stand up to the Spoilers; Nolitye can save the life of Rex, the leader of a pack of talking township mutts; and dare to look scary MaMtonga with her living brown-and-green snake necklace in the eye.

But soon Nolitye finds out that the purplish-blue magic stone is but five stones needed to put right things that started to go wrong the day her father died in a mining accident when she was five years old. Or so she was told by her mother ...

By merging a cast of characters straight out of African myth folklore with everyday township life, K. Sello Duiker created a magical world and a truly wondrous quest, a timeless tale that will appeal to an ageless audience.

Tshepo, a young student at Rhodes, has a difficult time keeping up with his own strange mind. He is absorbed in making sense of a traumatic past in a violent country and so when he finds himself at the Valkenberg mental facility, it is perhaps not entirely due to “cannabis-induced psychosis”. How is he to bring together the shattered pieces of his life? In the shady subculture of male prostitution Tshepo begins to find answers for the first time.

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.

Nolitye lives in a shack with her mother Thembi in Phola, a dusty township on the edge of Johannesburg. She is good at maths and likes collecting stones, which she places in a bucket under her bed. She also has unusual powers: she can communicate with dogs. Nolitye has two close friends, Bheki, who is overweight, and the bespectacled Four Eyes, who join with her to resist the bullying from Rotten Nellie and her gang of Spoilers.One day, Nolitye finds a special stone that has the power to make people feel happy and laugh. Her mission from now on is to gather together the other pieces of the stone and reunite them, to stop darkness from taking control of her world.

Every city has an unspoken side. Cape Town, between the picture postcard mountain and sea, has its own shadow: a place of dislocation and uncertainty, dependence and desperation, destruction and survival, gangsters, pimps, pedophiles, hunger, hope, and moments of happiness. Living in this shadow is Azure, a thirteen-year-old who makes his living on the streets, a black teenager sought out by white men, beholden to gang leaders but determined to create some measure of independence in this dangerous world. Thirteen Cents is an extraordinary and unsparing account of a coming of age in Cape Town. Reminiscent of some of the greatest child narrators in literature, Azure’s voice will stay with the reader long after this short novel is finished. Based on personal experiences, Thirteen Cents is Duiker’s debut novel, originally published in 2000. This first edition to be published outside South Africa includes an introduction by Shaun Viljoen and a special glossary of South African words and phrases from the text translated into English.