What do you get when three South African friends – a chef, an artist and a stylish woman with boundless energy and vision – are intent on the adventure of a lifetime? You get Festive France, a beautiful book filled with evocative photographs, amusing anecdotes and sumptuous recipes, celebrating the pleasures and pitfalls of rural life.

It was Philip Graham, legendary publisher of The Washington Post in the 1960s, who coined the epigram that the journalist’s role is to write ‘a first rough draft of history’.

It is a concept that has long fascinated veteran journalist Allister Sparks, because it means that a collection of those rough drafts can present a different kind of history, a contemporaneous history. With the perfect vision of hindsight, historians can reconstruct events as they actually turned out. But the question is, what did it look like at the time, when the future was anything but obvious?

A remarkable true story about one family in a country under siege, and a testament to the love, perseverance, and resilience of the human spirit.

Born and raised in Zimbabwe, Douglas Rogers escaped the dull future mapped out for him by his parents for one of adventure in Europe and the US. But when President Robert Mugabe launched the violent programme to reclaim white-owned land and Rogers’s parents were caught in the cross-fire, everything changed. Owners of Drifters, a popular game farm and backpackers lodge in the Eastern Highlands, Lyn and Ros found their home under siege, their friends and neighbors expelled, and their lives in danger. But instead of leaving, as their son pleads them to, they haul out a shotgun and decide to stay.

Twenty years ago Rian Malan wrote the best-selling book My Traitor’s Heart. Readers were both entranced and repelled by a remarkable book that cut to the heart of South Africa with its honesty and power. It still sells today.

Malan’s new book Resident Alien is a provocative and engaging collection of the best of his writings that have appeared in the likes of The New Yorker, Rolling Stone and Esquire, since My Traitor’s Heart.

Crisscrossing South Africa – and further afield – in a quest to understand the land and continent of his birth – Malan does time with an extraordinary cast of characters: from vigilantes and outlaws to beauty queens and truckers; from Sol Kerzner to Jackie Selebi; from JM Coetzee to the last Afrikaner in Tanzania.

APOLOGY: In the book "Hani: A Life Too Short", written by Janet Smith and Beauregard Tromp and published by Jonathan Ball Publishers, it was stated that Tsepo Sechaba tried to lay some of the blame for what had happened at the Quatro camps on Chris Hani and it was suggested that Mr Hani may have been not only a witness but a party to violence and torture.

The statement in the book is wrong and has caused Mr Sechaba hurt and embarrassment. The authors and Jonathan Ball Publishers apologise to Mr Sechaba unreservedly for the error contained in the book.

Chris Hani’s assassination in 1993 gave rise to one of South Africa’s great imponderables: if he had survived, what impact would he have had on politics and government in South Africa? More pointedly, could this charismatic leader have risen to become president of the country?

Hani was a hero of South Africa’s liberation, a communist party leader and Umkhonto we Sizwe chief of staff who was both intellectual and fighter, a man who could inspire an army but carried a book of poetry in his backpack. Hani led MK into its earliest battles, and carved a formidable reputation as a thinker, debater and peacemaker.