Nicholas Morris is a fundamentally decent chap who likes order, and isn’t given to messy emotions. He and his ‘sort-of’ girlfriend Leonora share a relationship that is comforting in its sameness, and he is ensconced in a well-paid career as an environmental lawyer.

Apart from his frustration with the madness of Cape Town traffic, he is not aware of feeling any dissatisfaction with his lot. But then, he’s not aware of feeling very much at all, really. Until he realises he’s forgotten to vote in South Africa’s first democratic elections - because he was seeing to the long-overdue mowing of his lawn. With a jolt Nicholas begins to wonder if he isn’t being squeezed to the margins of his own dull life, despite the efforts of his flamboyantly gay colleague Gerhard, who constantly tries to provoke him into letting go and living a little.

But soon Nicholas has no choice. When he takes on a case to save the baboons of Cape Point from developers, he becomes drawn into intrigues involving a charismatic liberal judge, dinosaurs of the old régime and the full cast of the wealthy Tomlinson family, not to mention its golden boy heir.

When the baboons are captured for experimentation by a research institute from the Old South Africa, which has somehow become incorporated into the New, he finds himself acting with uncharacteristic passion and conviction. Sucked into a whirlpool of deceit, he finds a lot more going on below the surface than he’d ever imagined – and soon he is not only struggling with his own identity, but also fighting for his life.

The Reluctant Passenger is a hugely entertaining and intelligent comic novel set in contemporary Cape Town. The rainbow nation begins to unravel in a hilarious riot of traffic chaos, ecological mayhem and sexual discovery. Irreverent, satirical and uninhibited, this novel retains something of the poignancy of The Children’s Day, and all of its humour.

Michiel Heyns was until recently professor of English at the University of Stellenbosch. Following the huge success of his remarkable debut novel, The Children's Day, published last year by Jonathan Ball, he now writes full time. His quiet intellect and dry humour make this novel a wonderfully satisfying romp.

The critics had this to say about The Children’s Day: ‘What sets it apart from the start is the quality of the writing: the humour, the wryness and Heyns’s skilful use of the power of understatement.’ –David Medalie, Sunday Independent ‘I was …willingly ensnared in “the cool web” of Heyns’s novel-making.’ – Rachelle Greeff It is beautifully and profoundly written, I laughed out loud in some passages. I was outraged in others and felt extraordinarily moved at the end of it. It is the best book I have read so far this year. – Janet van Eeden-Harrison, Natal Witness

The Reluctant Passenger by Michiel Heyns is published by Jonathan Ball Publishers at R139,95 ISBN: 1868421600 * Trade Paperback * Pages 435 * October 2003

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.

This long-awaited and elegant English translation of Elsa Joubert’s much-acclaimed novel, Die Reise van Isobelle, now invites English-speaking readers to share the author’s unique account of the lives of an ordinary South African family against the backdrop of a century of extraordinary national and international upheaval.

Set between 1894 and 1994 and spanning four generations, this engaging and beautifully told saga focuses on the lives of the women of the family, whose literal and metaphorical journeys between the start of the Anglo-Boer War and the birth of democracy in South Africa provide the fabric of the narrative.
It explores especially the tensions created by the conflict between loyalty to the family and loyalty to one’s own beliefs.

Elsa Joubert probes with profound insight and acute observation the influences, cultural and historical, that drove otherwise decent, essentially well-meaning South Africans to the evil of apartheid.

She confronts with rare courage and frankness the undeclared civil wars that white South Africans waged among themselves for almost a hundred years, and counts the cost in the disappointments and wasted lives the conflict produced. Isobelle’s Journey reveals the essential tragedy of what took place in South Africa: it exposes inescapably the guilt and innocence of the Afrikaner nation.

Elsa Joubert was born in Paarl and lives in Cape Town. Throughout her illustrious and very prolific career she has been awarded almost every prize for Afrikaans writing, some more than once. Die Reise van Isobelle was awarded the W A Hofmeyer Prize and the Hertzog Prize (probably the most prestigious award for Afrikaans writing). Elsa was also awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Stellenbosch for this magnificent book. Elsa has also been recognised internationally for her work, and was awarded the Winifred Holtby Prize by the British Royal Society of Literature, as well as being made a Fellow of the Society for her novel The Long Journey of Poppie Nongena (originally published in Afrikaans as Die Swerfjare van Poppie Nongena). Poppie has been voted one of the top 100 best books of the 20th century.

Jock of the Bushveld, published in 1907, has been read and enjoyed by millions of children and is now a classic among animal stories. It remains as fresh and exciting as it was when it was first written. Since its release in 1907 it has remained a firm favourite in South Africa and has been widely read abroad; it has been printed in many languages including Afrikaans, Dutch, French, Xhosa and Zulu. Jock’s owner was a young transport rider in the rugged and colourful days of the Transvaal gold rush. Those were the days when big game roamed the land and each sunrise brought a new adventure.

Fitzpatrick first told his children about his adventures with his dog at bedtime. It was his close friend Rudyard Kipling who convinced him to collect the stories and record them in a book. The story of the bull terrier who shared his master’s life on the veld has been illustrated with lively sketches by Edmund Caldwell.

Fitzpatrick searched for a suitable artist to illustrate the book and settled on the talents of Edmund Caldwell, and he went as far as to take Caldwell to South Africa to see the Bushveld to ensure the authenticity of his illustrations.

Sir Percy Fitzpatrick was a politician, author and a pioneer of the fruit industry. He was the eldest son of James Coleman Fitzpatrick, judge of the Supreme Court of the Cape Colony, and Jenny Fitzgerald, both from Ireland. Percy was educated at Downside Abbey, near Bath, England, and later at St Aidan's College, Grahamstown. On his father's death in 1880 he left college in order to support his mother and her family. In 1884 he went to the Eastern Transvaal gold-fields where he worked as a storeman, prospector's hand and journalist, and as a transport-rider from Lourenco Marques by ox-wagon to Lydenburg and Barberton. In Barbeton he became editor of the Gold Field News. He died in 1931.