Daan van der Walt, a Latin-quoting, God-fearing former Kalahari farmer, visits his estranged son in China for the first time.

When he has a vertigo attack soon after his arrival, his son drops him off at a Buddhist monastery. Under the guidance of Master Yang, an obstreperous Daan is made to practice Tai Chi to recover his balance, both physically and spiritually. He soon finds himself on a difficult path (the Dao of the title) to come to terms with his feelings of remorse and guilt. He sets out to write his Historia, or confessions, in the form of letters to his deceased wife and imaginary observations to his beloved dog.

An unusual, often very funny, novel whose fields of reference include Roman and Greek mythology, Christian theology, Chinese history and Daoism.

An astounding debut by an octogenarian author; translated by Michiel Heyns.

When zoologist Magrieta Prinsloo is put on the wrong antidepressant, her head comes unstuck. She insults the head of her department, and impulsively resigns from her job. She accepts a position at the Bureau for Continuing Education, with the inscrutable Markus Potsdam as her boss. When he disappears one morning, matters become very complicated. Winterbach's extraordinary gift as a novelist, and uncanny understanding of the human psyche, are again as evident as ever.

This lively and original book examines the notion that the realist novel reinforces existing social structures through its techniques of representation. Michiel Heyns depicts the nineteenth-century literary scapegoat - the ostensible victim of the expulsive pressure of plot - as begetter of an alternative vision, questioning the values apparently upheld by the novel as a whole. Novels, like communities, need scapegoats to rid them of their unexpressed anxieties. This has placed the realist novel under suspicion of collaborating with established authority, by reproducing the very structures it often seeks to criticize. Expulsion and the Nineteenth-Century Novel investigates this charge through close and illuminating readings of five realist novels of the nineteenth century: Austen's Mansfield Park, Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, Eliot's Daniel Deronda, Conrad's Lord Jim, and James's The Golden Bowl. Michiel Heyns looks at these works in relation to one another, to their literary and social contexts, and to modern critical thinking. Sceptical of unexamined abstractions, but appreciative of the acumen of much recent criticism, this book places the realist novel in the centre of current debates, while yet respecting the power of literature to anticipate the insights of the its critics.

When Natasha, a novice writer from South Africa, is nominated for a major British literary prize, Terence, a young university lecturer, undertakes to introduce her to the sights of London.

However, London and its literary cliques are a far cry from Natasha’s Karoo hometown: through no fault of her own, she is disqualified, and their affair ends in tragedy. Terence, whose best friend accuses him of suffering from a Good Samaritan complex, now takes an interest in a rough sleeper and his dog that he meets outside a tube station.

This turns out to be a complex undertaking. As the ghosts of his past relationships are visited upon him, Terence is forced to reconsider the meaning of human connections – how our lives touch, and are touched by, others.

Michiel Heyns’s Each Mortal Thing shows us the metropolis through fresh eyes, calculates the cost of acts of kindness, and speaks to the grace that friendship can bestow on us.

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2020 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE At the end of the eighteenth century, a giant strides the Cape Colony frontier. Coenraad de Buys is a legend, a polygamist, a swindler and a big talker; a rebel who fights with Xhosa chieftains against the Boers and British; the fierce patriarch of a sprawling mixed-race family with a veritable tribe of followers; a savage enemy and a loyal ally. Like the wild dogs who are always at his heels, he roams the shifting landscape of southern Africa, hungry and spoiling for a fight. This is his story; the story of his country, and of our blood-soaked history.

I Am Pandarus is a retelling, from a modern perspective, of the story of Troilus and Criseyde, as previously told by Chaucer and Shakespeare. The narrator in Michiel Heyns’ lively iteration is the go-between, Pandarus. But the novel opens in a gay bar in present-day London when an editor at a publishing house, recently abandoned by his lover, is accosted by a charismatic stranger.

The stranger turns out to be the modern avatar of Pandarus, intent on getting his version of events published; countering the unflattering portrait of him that Shakespeare has given to the world. The main body of the novel is Pandarus’ retelling of the story of Troilus and Criseyde from his own very particular point of view.

This central narrative is interspersed with periodic meetings of the editor with Pandarus, as the latter supplies instalments of his tale. The result is an urbane and sparkling rendition of a classical tale, in a style which old and new fans of award-winning Michiel Heyns will love.

He presses the button to activate the screen of the CCTV system: two sharply pointed dog's ears. A wolfhound; except that a wolfhound can’t reach that high. He keeps the button pressed in and peers at the blue-grey night scene of the pavement and the section of the road covered by the cameras at the gate. The dog’s head, abnormally large, stares back at him. There’s something about the hairiness of the dog hairs and the oddly impassive gaze of the dark pin-hole eyes that doesn’t seem quite right. And where’s the rest of the dog-creature’s body? He knows who it is even before the deliberately-gruffened voice comes over the intercom. ‘Matt,’ says the dog-muzzle, ‘it’s me. Please open up.’ Mattheus Duiker, the only son of Benjamin Duiker, the former owner of Duiker’s Motors, opens the gate of their Cape Town mansion to his lover, Jack. Disguised as a wolf, Jack invades the intimate darkness in which Matt is waiting for his father to die and for his own life to take off. Shiny-eyed at the prospect, the two young men sneak past the study where the old blind man, dwelling on melancholy attachments and sombre suspicions, sits listening for the footfall of death. Eben Venter’s novel is an unsparing investigation into the relation between a father and his son, into the disenfranchisement of a man who can glean scant wisdom from the past to equip him for life in a rapidly changing dispensation. Passionate. Disturbing. A masterly unravelling of the fragile thread of feeling – Eben Venter at the top of his game.

After a thirty-year absence Christopher Turner returns to Paris. He is here to extricate his best friend’s son from the mercenary machinations of some Parisian gold-digger – or so it is assumed, at home in South Africa. Christopher, with melancholy memories of Paris, is deeply ambivalent about the city; and, as for the young Eric, Christopher remembers him as a brutish lout with little to recommend himself.

But both the city and the young man take Christopher by surprise: far from having been corrupted by the place, Eric turns out to have been immeasurably improved by it. The spoilt son has become a considerate and attentive host with charming manners. Furthermore, as Christopher is gradually introduced to Eric’s associates, he finds to his dismay that he likes them – above all, the beautiful Beatrice du Plessis, in her day a supermodel, now the mother of a young daughter apparently destined to follow in her mother’s footsteps. And Paris exerts her spell anew …

As Christopher comes to know and enjoy this ambiguous world, he finds his moral categories challenged: is beauty a trap for the innocent young, or a self-validating, even ennobling attribute of a fully lived life? Responding to the gentle appeal of Beatrice, he feels ever more strongly that the young man’s place is in Paris with her, rather than on his father’s farm in Franschhoek. But Eric has ideas of his own …

Exploring, as in the widely applauded Lost Ground, the tensions between the fatherland and a larger world, Michiel Heyns turns an ironic eye on the most seductive city on earth, and traces with humour and insight the invisible furies of the heart.

Three women look back in old age at a past they shared, not always harmoniously - Emmeline Pankhurst, the formidable suffragette; her daughter Sylvia; and Helen, who was loved by Harry, the neglected son of Emmeline and beloved brother to Sylvia. Through the narrative of each woman flits the figure of Christabel, Mrs Pankhurst's favourite daughter - selfish, vain but irresistible. The three accounts, sometimes contradictory, sometimes confirmatory, reconstruct piece by piece the events surrounding Harry's death and the human entanglements behind, indeed at times driving, the public acts of the time.

Award-winning novelist Michiel Heyns is back with a darkly comic tale.

When a young South African literary scholar, Michael Marcussi, is offered, via a Facebook contact, a house in the Tuscan village of Gianocini, he accepts with alacrity: this is just the space and quiet he needs to complete his study of Literary Representations of Tuscany.

But even before he has boarded his plane at Stansted Airport, things start vexing him: an obnoxious old man jumps the boarding queue, and Michael is given the evil eye by a belligerent bovver boy covered in tattoos. Nor is this to be his last meeting with these objectionable characters: they turn up in unexpected places, first in Florence and then in Gianocini itself, with a frequency that cannot be purely coincidental.

In the meantime Michael is pursuing his own extracurricular agenda, through the streets of Florence and the passages of the Uffizi, then through the medieval alleys of Gianocini, only to find himself the object of mysterious designs and the subject of some very disturbing paintings. Add to this the innocent but curious Wouter, the startlingly rude upper-class harridan, Sophronia, the beautiful but supercilious Paolo and a dog called Thanatos: the Tuscan sun never shone on a more bizarre mix.

After the sophisticated comedy of The Typewriter’s Tale and Invisible Furies, and the poignant ironies of Lost Ground, Michiel Heyns here returns to the broader comedy of The Reluctant Passenger, in a scintillating tale of love, revenge and trippa.

The murder of a beautiful woman shatters the rural village peace of Alfredville, and her husband, the police station commander, is jailed as chief suspect. Her cousin Peter, a freelance writer in London, returns to South Africa for the first time in decades – unsettled, curious, but also in search of a career-defining story.

On checking into the Queen’s Hotel he finds that things are not as straightforward as he imagined, and South Africa is not as he left it. His carefully ordered world is thrown into turmoil as his trip dredges up a long-abandoned past, forcing him to question the assumptions so easily held from the comfort of his London flat. He meets a mixture of locals, visitors, vagrants and migrants, but most momentously, Peter discovers that his bosom friend from school, Bennie Nienaber, is still in Alfredville – and is in fact now, acting station commander at the local police station. Peter re-establishes an awkward friendship with his erstwhile friend and the two warily circle each other, sharing reminiscences that hint at a bond much deeper than nostalgia.

As Peter abandons the neatly patterned story he had planned and is forced to participate in a community that he once despised, he begins to reconsider his place in the world. In search of Desirée’s story, he now starts to rewrite his own – till events take an even more shocking turn….

Lost Ground explores questions of xenophobia and prejudice, of national, sexual and personal identity, and what it means to be a foreigner wherever you go.

Based on a real expedition by two American naturalists in the early 1900s, this novel starts out as a gung-ho African adventure story and becomes a stark portrait of misguided plans and colonial corruption. Willis Reed, a zoologist, and Guy Nichols, an entomologist, are commissioned by the Antwerp Zoo to bring back the first live specimen of an okapi, a shy, forest-dwelling creature that had taken on an almost mythical status after first being described by Sir Harry Johnston in 1902. Setting off into the jungles of central Africa, the men are confident about their mission to further scientific knowledge, but their idealism is eroded by encounters with Belgian colonial officials, fanatical rubber farmers, local tribes, and their own isolation.

Danny Marais is the twin brother of the beautiful, talented Charlie. The Wildest Beauty is a remarkable novel, Danny’s account of their childhood . . . up to their eventual enlistment in the First World War. From their placidly peaceful Stellenbosch schooldays to, ultimately, the Battle of Delville Wood, Danny keeps a loving but halfresentful eye on his brother.

The novel is also an intimate account of a small group of friends and family, inter alia the loving parents left behind in Stellenbosch during wartime. And then there is Danny’s life-changing encounter, in the darkened streets of wartime London, with a wryly cynical, battlescarred officer.

In the midst of the greatest conflict in history, facing the wild beauty of ‘the abyss of unmeaning’, Danny discovers the power of love, between friends, family – and even foes.