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This Month's Featured Book
Of (White) heroes and mad Englishmen
The quaint tale of a misguided adventurer in central Africa during the first world war hides the real brutality behind the facade of an all-embracing Empire.
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Filling a large South African hole
The novel’s mundane story of a coming of age becomes a unique insight into both the mind of the young female narrator and of a period in the history of South Africa. It is an intelligent and highly accomplished work of imagination.
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Uncommon realities
This 10 stories in Un/common Ground are South African poet Allan Kolski Horwitz's debut volume of fiction. While the plots are fairly wide-ranging and deal with scenarios as diverse as failed relationships, racial murders, futuristic utopian societies and zombies in contemporary Johannesburg, there is in Horwitz's work a fascination with the sadism, savagery and irrationality that lurks beneath humanity's somewhat flimsy pretences of civilisation.
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Gastronomic rhapsodies
InSalutation to the Gut Nigeria's Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka brings his painstakingly choosy palate, sourced in cultural origin, to bear on his polemical composition on Yoruba food and drink – Salutation to the Gut. Originally published in 1962, it is now published as a small pocket size book.
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Trauma in the telling
It is surprising that a short story anthology as innovative, and brave, as Post-Traumatic struggled to make it into print, until Botsotso published the 22 contributions by young South African writers. As the title implies, the anthology deals with life in this country after the death of apartheid, for a multitude of perspectives.
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Dreams packaged as reality
Angolan author José Eduardo Agualusa has created a magical tale the line between fact and fiction, between history and story, as a gecko narrates the tale of an albino businessman in Luanda who creates personal histories in O Vendedor de Passados (The Genealogy Salesman).
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Many languages, no barrier
Gova is a book of poetry written in one of South Africa's unofficial languages, Isicamtho – a polyglot of the 11 official languages and one which has its origins in the so-called tsotsi taal of the Black gehttoes. Ike Mboneni Muila is a master of this language and encourages readers to dive in. Book comes with audio CD.
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