Shades of Darkness is a poignant love-story which highlights the role played, and the price paid, by a handful of opponents of the apartheid regime in the ‘dark’ days of the struggle. Jamie Cathcart, the central character, is introduced as a somewhat naïve South African university student of the 1960s, though with strong views on racial inequality, who becomes involved in the clandestine political activities of a group of anti-apartheid activists. As a result he is detained by the security police. Days after his release, he and his long-standing girlfriend, Jenny Dicey, a ballet student with whom he is deeply in love, leave South Africa for England. A dozen years later, on hearing that his beloved younger brother is dying of cancer in Cape Town, he returns to South Africa without the visa necessary because of his political past. What happens before and after that return is a tale of fiendish malice, which explores the recesses of minds and hearts deformed by the irrational fear of swartgevaar and ‘communism’. At the same time the novel illuminates the infinite capacity of the battered human spirit to triumph over adversity without necessarily becoming debased.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Shades of Darkness is Jonty Driver's fifth novel, and the third set mainly in South Africa. He has also published six books of poetry and a biography, Patrick Duncan - South African and Pan-African, which, like his first two novels, was immediately banned in South Africa, though re-issued in 2000. Born in 1939, Jonty Driver was elected President of the National Union of South African Students in 1963 and 1964, shortly after graduating from the University of Cape Town. In August and September 1964, he was detained by the security police on suspicion of involvement with the African Resistance Movement, and immediately afterwards left for England. After a year's teaching, he went to Trinity College, Oxford, to read for an M.Phil degree and afterwards returned to teaching, in due course becoming headmaster at various celebrated schools, including Wellington College (1989 - 2000). For more than twenty years he was prohibited from returning to South Africa. He is now a full-time writer; he contributes regularly to the Daily Telegraph and occasionally to other periodicals like the Times Literary Supplement and Granta. He and his wife live in East Sussex but travel regularly to South Africa.

South Africa in the late eighties. In an independent high school, the students – all black – suspect a white female teacher of supporting the Conservative Party. A group of workers are retrenched and suddenly this former haven of peace is spiralled into the conflicts, the contradictions, the heroism, the pathos and the absurdity of the times.

Bertelsmann powerfully and realistically portrays the various ways in which the resistance politics of the ‘old’ South Africa affected education during the strife-torn period of the 1980s and early 1990s. The highly effective narrative technique confronts the reader and has profound emotional impact.

Helmut Bertelsmann was born in Germany in 1949 and grew up in Namibia and South Africa. He has worked as a translator and party political organiser, but has spent most his working life as a teacher, university lecturer, college principal and manager of education development projects in South African rural and township areas. He lives with his wife Ann, in Johannesburg. This is his first novel.

The spirit of the Xhosa society was enshrined in an oral tradition through which, from generation to generation, the community transmitted its customs, values, and norms.

The poet and the storyteller stood at the centre of this tradition, as the community’s chroniclers, entertainers, and collective conscience. Xhosa novelist and critic, A C Jordan was an enthusiastic observer of the customs and history of his people, particularly of the oral narrative performances he witnessed first as a child, and later during his many journeys throughout South Africa.

Now, when traditional storytellers, and the oral tradition itself, have almost been lost to us, Jordan’s vivid written translations and versions of some of the best-loved Xhosa folk tales, with their heroes and monsters, children lost and found, wayward adolescents and their rites of passage, are a celebration of the vibrant heart of the culture. Tales from Southern Africa was first published in America in 1973; this is the first South African edition.

Archibald Campbell Jordan was born 0n 30 October 1906 in Mbokotwana, Transkei. The son of a minister of the Anglican Church, he won a Transkei Bhunga scholarship and studied for a College Education Diploma and a Bachelor of Arts degree at the University College of Fort Hare. After teaching for ten years at the African High School in Kroonstad, he obtained his Masters in African Languages from the University of South Africa. He was appointed lecturer in African Languages at Fort Hare in 1945, and the following year he became lecturer in the department of African Languages at the University of Cape Town. In 1961 Jordan was refused a passport by the South African Government to travel abroad. He left without a passport to avail himself of a Carnegie grant to visit overseas universities and to investigate the latest developments in African languages and literatures. He went to the University of California, Los Angeles, where he remained for two years. In 1963 he went to the University of Wisconsin as a fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities, and in 1964 he was appointed professor of African Languages and Literature, a post he held until he died on 20 October 1968.

Set on a cane farm in Natal, The Arrowing of the Cane chronicles a stage in the life of sugar planter James Colville. Steeped in mood and evocative imagery, the novel is the story of one man’s conflict not only within himself, but also with the society that surrounds hi. Haunted by historical associations and faced with the dissolution of his world, James Colville is determined to record the present as truthfully as possible for posterity.

The Arrowing of the Cane ensured that the author, John Conyngham, became the joint winner of the AA Mutual/AD Donker Vita Award in 1985 for, as well as winner of the Olive Schreiner Prize and the Sanlam Award.

John Conygnham was born in Durban in 1954. He spent his early life on a sugar farm and was educated in South Africa, England and Ireland. After his national service he taught briefly before joining The Natal Witness as a sub-editor and was appointed editor in 1994. Married, with a son and daughter, he lives near Pietermaritzburg.

Peter Wilhelm, award-winning author of four novels, three collections of short stories, two volumes of poetry and a collection of satirical columns, has now put together a unique selection of novellas and stories entitled The Bayonet Field.

Some of these are previously published, but new stories have been added to form a powerful chronicle extending from the time of the Boer War into the realms of the future. The stories, set in South Africa, form an expansive drama with recurring characters and settings. The focus is on the survival of the individual, in times of violence, change, and even the future. Sometimes esoteric, sometimes psychologically challenging and hard-hitting, they are all stories that deal with the ability of man to adapt to cataclysmic circumstances.

Peter Wilhelm was born in Cape Town, where he now lives and works. His novel The Mask of Freedom won the Sanlam Award for Literature and he has received other awards in recognition of his critical writings.