So the year is 2023. Three years prior HCV or the Human Culgoa Virus  pretty much wiped out all men, thus any remaining males are rare, valuable commodities, for all the obvious reasons (think sperm or ‘white gold’).  Two sisters are fighting for possession of one 12 year old boy, Miles. Although from South Africa originally they are all currently in America, but sister Cole, mother of the prized boy is desperate to get him, and herself, safely home. The other sister Billie, is on their trail and desperate to lay her hands on the boy - for nefarious reasons (think kidnap).  With one having tried to kill the other, the tension is heightened and deception levels plummet to dark and ugly depths.  
Along the way we get involved in:  The dirty dealings of the Department of Men and the grim facility where survivors are held, Cole’s relationship with her savvy but impressionable teenage son (which is a lot to do with staying on the same linguistic wavelength), with ‘his’ transformation into a ‘her’ as Mila, and Billie’s agonising attempts at staying alive and focused with a suppurating head wound. We also travel with mother and son, as well as their pursuers,  to Florida for their escape.  Along the way, we meet up with some finely crafted wicked and weirdo characters, as well as a bizarre cult-like order of nuns, the Sisters of All Sorrows, a band of flawed women struggling with their identities.
If that were all, it would be just another scare-story. But what makes Afterland so compelling over and above the man-gone concept, is Beukes’s way with words – her cinematic images, insightful references and finger-on-the-pulse dialogue.  In another life, she’d make a helluva good script writer – if indeed she isn’t already. Another of her earlier books The Shining Girls has just been taken up for adaptation into a TV series to be produced by Elisabeth Moss and Leonardo DiCaprio. And just while we’re name-dropping, in his review in the New York Times, writing guru Stephen King describes Afterland as ‘a smartly written thriller that opens with a satisfying bang.’
But what is so gob-smackingly eerie about this title is its coincidence with the very real viral pandemic in the grip of which we find ourselves right now. Nope, Beukes wasn't clairvoyant nor privvy to any prescient medical intel  – she started writing the book at least five years ago having done her usual meticulous, hands-on research to find out more about viruses. But that it finally came into being at almost exactly the same time as COVID19, sends shivers up the spine – or through the sperm.  Of course unlike HCV, not only men are targeted by COVID – but the gender focus in Afterland raises all kinds of additional issues. Which will surely get you thinking. Enjoy the ride!

She writes with a sharp wit and, coupled with huge affection, she cuts to the core of the subject. And if you think that’s a pun….well maybe it is because the novel is in part a love story to food, with village life and travel to distant parts thrown in.  But more importantly it was inspired by the little known story of the 110 young Italian men recruited to work on the South African Railways in the 1950s – and who brought the wonders of Italian cuisine to this country.
It is the early 1950s. Picture the scene. Campino, a tiny village in the North of Italy, is typical of village life. Everyone knows everyone’s business, families are extended, the farmers are rough and gruff, where the town gossip relishes misdemeanours and tragedy, where weddings are everyone’s business and where frog risotto is a local delicacy. Meet the coffin maker, the silkworm farmer, the baker, bulky Zia Andromaca and orphan Pistola.  Brought up by his grandfather, Nonno Mario, who is renowned for his cooking skills and his voice, the teenager hardly remembers his mother, who died in the war, and the father is a mystery.  Pistola (given name Ettore – I’ll leave you to guess why he was called Pistola) is in love with the local pig farmer’s daughter Teresa, who also happens to be his second cousin. Pigs are an important part of village life - think anti - pasta and you’ve got the picture.  
‘There have always been twice as many pigs as people in the valley. Male pigs are smaller than females and have to perform miracles.’
Food is a second religion and greetings such as ‘have you had a good meal?’ are more common than ‘how are you?’ When Teresa is destined to marry the local thug, the task of planning and cooking some of the many wedding feast courses falls to Nonno Mario.  A heartbroken Pistola drowns himself in helping his grandfather as his dreams of the future slip away.
To ease the heartache Pistola accepts a job in faraway, apartheid throttled South Africa. Working on the trains as a steward this young naïve village boy takes his first steps to manhood. From Johannesburg’s Hillbrow to the jazz clubs of Sophiatown,  Pistola and his compatriots explore a new world and start finding out who they really are – and what they really want.  But it is when Pistola falls in love with the activist Malikah, that the trouble really begins.
This deliciously sensuous novel grabs you from the first as Prendini -Toffoli writes with an energy and full bodied style that is easily read and thoroughly enjoyed.  Italy in its finest traditional food glory is beautifully illustrated and she contrasts this with what was on offer in the then South Africa.  Scenes are set with precision and it is a veritable feast.  Pistola’s dream of becoming a restaurateur by taking over the local mansion in his village, is somewhat distorted as, with adventures galore, family intrigues and unexpected journeys, his path takes some unusual turns.
Such a real book – I lived the streets of Hillbrow, the cramped apartment living, the transient population and remembered the popularity and the treat of going to a ‘real’ Italian restaurant in the 1970s.
What a legacy these young men left on our food landscape.
When I closed the book I wanted the story to go on…i want to know what happens to Pistola next and for me that is a sign of great characterisation and an engrossing, warm story. Oh, and this story with its colour and characters would make a great TV series. ​

​Reading it I remember thinking, gee whizz – from which part of Jo’burg’s heaving innards did she source this inside info!  Well, wherever it came from she has gone back for more. Featured in Knucklebone were former cop Ian Jack and his one-time colleague Reshma Patel – and we find them again in Three Bodies, very definitely an item. And with the frontline peril of Reshma’s new appointment in a highly specialised cash heist prevention unit, you wonder how they sleep at night.
But stepping back from the crime and underworld, in a recent interview, NR Brodie, under which name she writes her thrillers, declares that her books always have an environmental backstory.  In Archipelago, chapter one of Three Bodies, she puts her cards on the table with an alarming environmental foreground. Gardener Jonas Jiyane, methodically goes about his work removing triffid-like water hyacinth out of the Hartbeespoort dam. Water already strangled by algae where   fish suffocate and he retrieves golf balls for resale. In the same interview she highlights the importance of unsettling otherwise ‘normal’ situations. And in the same chapter she does just this. As a thick black rope emerges from the water, Jonas, initially shocked thinking it to be a snake, realises it’s just rubbish. Until he finds there to be a whole mass of these spongey black ropes, writhing, apparently attached to something. ‘Something big.’ Turns out to be human hair. Attached to - a body. And so we have the first of the three bodies – all found in watery graves. Water is a theme that ripples through the book, beautiful but dangerous, pure but polluted, transparent but infinitely dark.
Next thing Reshma finds herself in a tunnel underneath Park Station, where there’s a channel filled with ‘unpleasant-looking brown water… the source of a thick stench of something like sewage’.
But Reshma is no sissy. Another theme that Brodie embraces (as a champion of feminism) is that a woman can be not just a cop, but a strong, fearless one. And that many cops do what they do in the name of truth and justice. In one hair-raising chapter in a strike on a heist-in-action, ‘Reshma, hyper-alert, kept her eyes fixed ahead of her. She’d fired off three shots on the approach. She didn’t want to waste more bullets, but there was a lone gunman on the blind side of the van.’
To be honest, I’m no crime-thriller fan – but back to Nechama Brodie, her research is intensely impressive. As is the level of her curiosity. In the acknowledgments she says ‘It is nearly a decade since I sat in a small Maboneng apartment with Gogo Nokulinda Mkhize and we discussed mermaids trapped in the Hartbeespoort Dam. The idea stayed with me, nor because it seemed implausible but because it had the feeling of truth (this might not be your truth, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t so).’
Thrillers may not be your thing either, but it doesn’t mean there isn’t something more to them than crime.

internationally bestselling nonfiction books about her life as a wildlife scientist in Africa including Cry of the Kalahari, her debut novel is an astounding piece of literary fiction. 
Prejudice, injustice, solitude and conservation are the main themes in this novel and the narrative is a sensitive and creative ‘tour de force’.  The inhabitants of the small town of Barkley Cove are wary and suspicious of the so-called Marsh Girl’, Kya Clark. She has lived a solitary existence on the marshes all her life. Abandoned by her mother and then her siblings, Kya is left as a small child with unpredictable Pa. With no schooling until the conservationist hungry Tate enters her waters, she is a bright and intelligent child whose love of the marsh natural heritage leads her into creative places where the birds become her friends and her artistic prowess is given free reign. Left completely alone at the age of ten the resourcefulness of this child allows her to use all the skills learnt from her Pa and brother Jodie to eke out an existence. She is a curiosity, not least to the immature teenage boys of the town who are fascinated by her wild beauty. But when one of their own, the golden boy of the town, Chase Andrews, is found dead in her territory the town turns on her.  What transpires is an enthralling story, weaving together the magic of nature with the harsh realities of small town prejudice.    At once a murder mystery, love story and coming-of-age novel. Hugely imaginative Owens has crafted a novel that is memorable and sensitive, yet at its core, disturbing. ​

Alice and Natalie Kessler, he reveals a secret painting. Kessler Sisters is an evocative piece of art, portraying the charming young artist himself, with Alice and Natalie.
Bayber persuades Dennis Finch, an art history professor, and Stephen Jameson, a young authenticator, to explore the possibility of selling the painting. It sounds like a simple enough request…but there is a caveat. They first need to locate the sisters, who seem to have vanished.
 Revelations about the past, are juxtaposed with clues Finch and Jameson discover in the present. History catches up with them all and we are drawn into family secrets, which have brought about devastating consequences. The question which lingered long after reading this story was - are we ever able to correct our past mistakes or should we be content to simply forgive them?
Guzeman writes with passion and delicacy. There are many evocative passages which I went back to a number of times. The author weaves the sisters’ conflict, the intrigue of a missing painting, and the grief of long lost love, into a poignant tale which resonated deeply.
I will be on the lookout for more of Tracy Guzeman’s work. ​

In fact it starts before that with his secrecy, strange behaviour and outbursts. These should have been warning signs – but the well-known, popular television and radio presenter, not knowing what more was in store, did her best to keep the peace.
But this was not the first time Going had been exposed to unpredictable behaviour and violence. Her story tracks back and forth to her childhood and school days when she would wait peeping through the curtain, for her drunk father as he staggered up the pathway, stopping to vomit. Or when she’d try to protect her sibling twins from the noise as his took out his wretchedness on her mother. This will never happen to me, she thought. I will never be beaten up. Never. Ever. History has a cruel way of repeating itself.
The book touches on a number of remembered incidences, hopes and dashed dreams in her life, and also on the many people who played significant roles. Going’s troubled brother who dies tragically in an accident weeks before his time in the army is up. Her then five-year-old son who tries to put cream on her badly bruised eye, her caring domestic Wilhelmina, the loyal friends who stood beside her in court and not least her devoted mother. But if the beating and the violence she describes are shocking, worse is the court ordeal. ‘He’ who remains nameless throughout the book (‘this is my story, not his’), is as menacing, sly, deceptive and vindictive throughout the drawn-out proceedings as he had been in the later stages of their short lived relationship. At one point he even jumps bail and leaves the country. The series of prosecutors, the cross-examinations, the patriarchal defence team, the manipulation are all alarming. The twist of the knife is when incredibly, the magistrate declares that ‘he’ ‘deserves another chance’ and finally, accuses her of exaggeration and ‘speaking to all and sundry in the media’. One can only hope that one day that magistrate reads her book.
In conclusion at a time when the country is imprisoned by a rampant virus and so many women are literally trapped in homes with abusive partners, as hard as it was for Going a woman of status and privilege to be heard and believed, how much harder, if not impossible it is for them. This is a shocking but vital book.  ​