‘I straighten her little tiara every morning – I lift her chin and remind her that she is meant for greater things than playground bullies.’

‘Everything shines in its own time. There is no timetable for life.
Timetables are for classrooms, not for people.’

These are just some of the wisdoms shared on The Village, South Africa’s beloved Facebook group for parents raising tweens, teens and young adults.

Having kids is a baffling endeavour beset with sulks, meltdowns, anxiety and disappointment – and that’s just the parents! When you get that call to the principal’s office? When the school acceptances don’t come? When the bedroom door slams and you hear your child sobbing behind it? All awful but the family years are also, to many of us, our most precious time. The trick? To find a way to enjoy our families, love our children and believe in them and ourselves despite the daily challenges. And laugh . . .

In this book, Vanessa Raphaely and Karin Schimke have gathered together experiences and insights from The Village members. These are the gems and remedies from the real parenting experts – the parents – to help you raise your family in your own perfectly imperfect way.

The authors spent time finding out how South African women respond to this phenomenon referred to as 'over 40'. The result is a title that a woman would give to herself, to a friend or to a daughter going through this 'big' transition period that involves psychological and physiological change that brings about much contemplation.

'Fabulously 40 and beyond' is written primarily from an extensive base of questionnaires as well as from feedback from media work during the book's development. The authors then synthesised and wrote this title from an extensive base of questionnaires and from feedback from media work to bring on important themes including identity, spirituality, body, family and other animals, leisure (and pleasure). At the centre is a certain power that women come into as they move into their 40's and beyond which is a clear measure of where women in their 40s are at. Clearly, the title demonstrates that these women have humour, lightness, know how much they own, and do juggle things to get things in life to go the way they want. The book offers practical advice as well as relevant statistics.

During the research phase 'Fabulously 40 and beyond' saw much media interest including a feature on SAFM Otherwise, in Femina magazine and on Radio 702. This is no doubt a much-needed book that fills a gap dealing with this often difficult or traumatic stage in women's lives.

In Irma Venter’s follow-up to the electric Hard Rain, Ranna Abramson returns home to the lion’s den to resurrect a long-dead past and save the man she loves.

Ranna Abramson wants to disappear.

But she knows she can’t keep running when a former enemy tracks her down in Mumbai with dire news: her onetime lover, journalist Alex Derksen, has disappeared back home in South Africa.

Torn between her desire for him and fear of a homecoming, Ranna knows she’s the only one who can find him. But only two things in South Africa would welcome her—the inside of a cell or the bottom of a grave. There, to the police she’s the prime suspect in three murders. To the press, she’s the Black Widow serial killer.

Despite her instinct to stay away, Ranna makes the journey. But the key to finding Alex lies in her painful past. And to uncover it, she’ll need to unravel a web of secrets tied to a long-forgotten crime.

Even if she finds Alex before it’s too late, Ranna must answer for past sins…or risk losing him forever.

In her second volume of poetry, poet Karin Schimke explores the idea of home, contemplating notions of belonging and un-belonging and the various places and ways in which one is “at home”. With her characteristic lyricism, Schimke questions the poet’s right or duty to speak, while delivering a meditation on love in all its cruel, gleaming facets, as she traces her own psychic constellations back into the blistering orbit of her father. Drawing from the blood and milk of memory, in symphonic shifts of language, her poems are as forgiving as they are furious, summoning both the elemental and the numinous in a masterful painting of the relationship between people and the natural world. Traversing the haunted landscapes of the past and present, the political and the personal, Navigate is a psalm, startling in its honesty, unforgettable in its beauty.

Never unruly, always controlled, Karen Schimke’s debut collection from Modjaji Books is an exploration of longing and lust, heartbreak and recovery, the wild heart fully alive. In Bare & Breaking Schimke gives full voice to the territory of a rich and keenly observed life, with a narrator who is engaged in every anguished moment, living it wholly and documenting the passion and blissful respite. Simultaneously delicate and demanding Schimke’s confessional narrator knows no shame, brooks no self-pity and draws the reader impatiently into her bedroom, the scene of the crime. She exposes her sheets and compels one to gaze upon her open jaw and naked breasts. She reveals both her bare and breaking heart and the tender ‘Denial’ of her imaginary post-divorce email.