A classic of literary nonfiction, My Traitor's Heart has been acclaimed as a masterpiece by readers around the world. Rian Malan is an Afrikaner, scion of a centuries-old clan and relative of the architect of apartheid, who fled South Africa after coming face-to-face with the atrocities and terrors of an undeclared civil war between the races. This book is the searing account of his return after eight years of uneasy exile.

Armed with new insight and clarity, Malan explores apartheid's legacy of hatred and suffering, bearing witness to the extensive physical and emotional damage it has caused to generations of South Africans on both sides of the color line. Plumbing the darkest recesses of the white and black South African psyches, Malan ultimately finds his way toward the light of redemption and healing. My Traitor's Heart is an astonishing book -- beautiful, horrifying, profound, and impossible to put down.

For Rian Malan, the blessing of living in South Africa is that every day presents him with material whose richness astounds those who live in saner places. Twenty years after the publication of his bestseller My Traitor's Heart, he is still strongly committed to the struggle against suffocating political rectitude. Malan eviscerates politicians, provokes rabid fury in Aids activists, pursues justice in the music industry, and exults in the company of an extraordinary cast of characters from truckers to tycoons.

In Sigh The Beloved Country, Bongani Madondo writes about people, issues, women who rock!!!, believers, fast boys and their faster toys, inner city and street life, and cultural criticism, amongst others.

Nobody escapes his critical pen, from Kenny Kunene, Miriam Makeba to Oscar Pistorius.

His 32 essays will make you laugh and cry as he captures the essence of every aspect of our country that makes it so weird and wonderful.

WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR In '70s' South Africa, Rian Malan - descendant of the architects of apartheid, middle-class white boy, friend to blacks - went to work as a crime reporter for a local Johannesburg rag. There he encountered first-hand the horrors wrought by apartheid: the poverty, injustice and violence. After an eight-year exile, he returned to write this book. With gripping stories and in mesmerising prose, this is Malan's attempt to understand his country, its racial hatred, and his own tortured conscience.

The author is a South African, heir to 300 years of white rule, yet at the same time a man at odds with the "rockspider tyranny" of his Afrikaner people, a stranger in the South Africa they have created. This is the author's exploration of the horror that lies at the core of a society gone wrong. It is not about South African politics, or history, but about darkness, primordial passions, ecstasy, blood, violence, wraiths and demons in the white consciousness, and similar unspeakable things.