Athol Fugard’s only novel Tsotsi is a powerful and turbulent story set in the 1950s about Tsotsi, a Sophiatown gangster, who stalks the streets leaving pain and terror in his wake. Derelict and deprived, he treats life as it has always treated him, until a chance encounter brings about a strange redemption. This is the only novel thus far by South Africa’s foremost playwright. It is a white man’s vision of a black ghetto, seen with nightmare clarity and insight.

Born in Middleburg, Cape Province in 1932, Fugard has written for the theatre and acted in over a dozen of his own plays. His works are performed widely throughout the English-speaking world and have been translated into several languages.

A breathtaking, atmospheric thriller and a stunning return for investigator Dr Clare Hart. The gruesome murder of a homeless teenage boy suggests a methodical serial killer is at work in Walvis Bay, a depressed port, isolated in the vast sweep of the Namib Desert. It is a corrupt, claustrophobic place with a shifting population of people who came here only because they had to and where people know everything - and nothing - about each other.

As part of a cross-border policing initiative, Dr Clare Hart is sent to profile the possible killer. She works with Captain Tamar Damases, an astute local detective, who heads up the coastal town's Sexual Violence and Murder Unit. Clare is glad to be distracted from the implosion of what was till a few days ago a blossoming love affair with Captain Riedwaan Faizal, who turned out to be more married than she thought.... As the two women trace older crimes that may be related to the recent killings, nothing is as it seemed at first. And as Riedwaan comes to join Clare, to help with the investigation and to try to salvage their relationship, she realises that the harbour holds more than just rusting Russian fishing trawlers, and that a deadly cargo is ready to sail. It's not just their relationship that is in danger, their very lives - and the lives of others - are at stake....

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Margie Orford is an award-winning journalist, photographer, film director, author and Fulbright scholar. Previous projects include Women Writing Africa, Fabulously 40 and Beyond: Women Coming into their Own and Fifteen Men: Words and Images from Behind Bars (Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2008). Daddy’s Girl is the third title in her Clare Hart series, and follows Like Clockwork and Blood Rose.

R130.00 • ISBN: 978-1-86842-348-4 • Aug 2009 • B-format Pb 127mmx192mm South African rights • Category: Crime fiction

‘BODIES POLITIC is a wonderfully elegant novel.’ 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.

Around these extraordinary women and their men Michiel Heyns has woven a novel of complex motivations disrupting the apparent unity of the Women’s Movement: Sylvia’s resentment of her mother’s treatment of Harry, Emmeline’s bitterness at Sylvia’s public opposition to her and her horror at Sylvia’s illegitimate child, Helen’s ambivalent feelings at having been summoned by Sylvia to Harry’s deathbed with an extraordinary request: ‘Tell him you love him; he has only three weeks to live.’

Against the background of massive public events – the struggle for the vote for women, the First World War – Bodies Politic examines, in fictionalised form, the private lives of the participants in these events, and the need for causes to be manifested in specific human bodies, in all their strength and weakness. Moving, dramatic and at times grimly humorous, Bodies Politic is an entirely original account of great love and bitter resentment, political victory and personal defeat; but ultimately of the indomitable spirit that escapes the shackles of the body.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Michiel Heyns went to school in Thaba Nchu, Kimberley, and Grahamstown, and studied at the universities of Stellenbosch and Cambridge. Following the huge success of his remarkable debut novel, The Children's Day, he now writes full time. He has published three novels, The Children’s Day, The Reluctant Passenger and The Typewriter’s Tale, all published by Jonathan Ball Publishers.

Price R160
ISBN: 978-1-86842-298-2
April 2008
TPB
Category: Fiction

Buxton Spice introduces a vibrant new voice. Set in Guyana in the seventies, it features a spirited young narrator, Lula, growing up in a world of wonder and danger. Against the backdrop of a disintegrating society, Lula and her friends explore their emerging sexuality. Impressionistic, raw and intimate, Buxton Spice captures the essence of the end of childhood and innocence. The book is written in interesting vernacular.

Oonya Kempadoo was born in England of Guyanese parents. She was brought up in Guyana. She has lived in Europe, various islands in the Caribbean, and now lives in Granada.

Set in South Africa’s turbulent 1980s and concluding in the post-apartheid 1990s, Clouds Like Black Dogs is a vivid and often violent story of loss and redemption. After a troubled upbringing on a West Coast farm, Manas Smith, a young coloured artist, is given assistance by a white benefactor to study art at Rhodes University, Grahamstown. There Manas encounters a spiralling world of political conflict. The repercussions of his naïve friendship with an activist poet, David Harris, are both unpredictable and terrifying. Similarly, his love affair with Zelda Sutton, a fellow art student and descendent of an old and respected

Eastern Cape farming family, at a time in South Africa’s history when love across the colour bar was not yet condoned, present s unimaginable dangers and consequences. Graham Lang strongly evokes the sinister atmosphere of brutality and treachery that pervaded South Africa’s political climate during the decade prior to the first democratic election in 1994. it is against this menacing background, and with great difficulty, that Manas finally learns that redemption comes at the cost of exoneration and accountability.

Graham Lang was born in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. A Master of Fine Art graduate from Rhodes University, he taught in various South African institutions before migrating to Australia in 1990. He is currently a senior lecturer in Fine Art at the University of Newcastle. An accomplished artist, Graham Lang has exhibited widely in South Africa and Australia.