Title: We Don't Talk About it. Ever.
Author: ​Desiree-ann Martin
Reviewer: Gail Gilbride
1980’s Cape Town and the colour of her skin is already an issue for five year old Desiree-Anne.
The child is unhappy with her doll’s darkness and wants to make her white. She has already internalized that Whites are ‘better’ than everyone else. Her father drinks and gambles. Men touch her inappropriately and her mother’s love is hard to come by. Martin finds her own ways of replacing the love so sorely lacking and at every Scripture Union camp she gives her heart to Jesus.

The unwritten rules in her family and community are, We Don’t Talk About It. Ever. As an awkward teenager in a ‘White School’, Desiree-Anne is painfully aware of her ‘Coloured’ status.  Self-harm, disordered eating, petty theft and escapism through books and acting are her methods of coping. She gives up the chance to study drama at UCT in favour of a trip to the UK where she gets lost in bars, clubs and pills. Back home, the Ecstasy trance club scene pulls her in. When Darren, a heroin addict, enters her life, she turns to needles and soon spirals down into addiction.
Martin’s account is harrowing, evocative and at times humorous. I am in awe of the brutal honesty and skilful writing. This memoir is a testament to the author’s love of words, which have become her addiction of choice.
I do hope Desiree-Anne Martins is well into her next offering and I’ll be watching for it.
Reviewer Gail Gilbride
Author of Under the African Sun 

Title: Johannesburg
Author: ​Fiona Melrose
Reviewer: Gail Gilbride
Fiona Melrose’s Johannesburg puts her on the map as one of South Africa’s most captivating novelists. 
The story takes place in the colourful city on the day of Nelson Mandela’s death. Gin has arrived from New York to organise her cantankerous mother’s eightieth birthday party. Close by, the Mandela family are about to announce Nelson Mandela’s death. Gin grapples with all that Johannesburg represents for her. Amongst many other things, she needs to juggle the arrival of her ex-boyfriend, the search for the missing dog and the celebration which her mother is resisting.
Melrose writes from the heart and manages to convey her deep, complicated love for both the place and the vibrant characters who work and live in it. Through various eyes; an artist’s to a hunchback with no home, we experience the day of Mandela’s death in a modern city grappling to keep up with the many changes happening around it.  
 Melrose writes with deep insight and offers us a glimpse of this beautiful but unforgiving place, which represents so much of the country itself.
I was mesmerized from the first page and will watch out for Fiona Melrose’s next masterpiece!
Review by Gail Gilbride, author of Under the African Sun .

Title: Grace: a Novel
Author: ​Barbara Boswell
Reviewer: Gail Gilbride
Secrets and lies form an integral part of Grace’s background.
The resilient young girl starts her journey in Cape Town of the 1980s. Despite her highly dysfunctional start in a family where relationships were heart breaking and complex beyond measure, she manages to overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles to carve out a respectable life for herself.
An old childhood friend emerges to reignite devastating childhood memories. Grace’s adult life is filled with love and stability, but half-truths and hidden family secrets threaten to derail everything she has worked so hard to build up. She faces an unbearable choice – reveal the truth or keep up the veneer.  
Barbara Boswell’s graceful prose and masterful story telling serve to present us with the long term effects of trauma and violence in families, which can follow generations of victims. It is never easy to break the cycle but Boswell offers us a window of hope and the possibility of doing just that.
Boswell has crafted a highly significant novel which has lingered long after the final page was turned. Grace is a must read and a wonderful addition to the South African writing landscape.
 
Gail Gilbride is author of Under the African Sun and co-author of Behind the Blue Door.
 
 
 
 
 

Title: Children of Hope: 
Author: ​Sandra Rowoldt Shell
Reviewer: Theresa Smith
​It contains reams of detail and analysis, but it is written clearly and succinctly. It is the kind of book you dip into, it is too dense to read in one sitting – but the subject matter keeps you coming back and the short chapters and titled sections make it easy to deal with just one topic at a time.
When she started working at Rhodes University’s Cory Library for Historical Research in 1972 Sandra Rowoldt Shell became fascinated by a stack of first hand narratives. They told the stories of Oromo children from Ethiopia who were educated at the Lovedale Institution in the Eastern Cape. That fascination never left her and she finally went down the rabbit hole and did a systematic analysis of not only the mini-biographies but everything else she could find out about the Oromo children.
Like any good research paper it contains lots of references to not only the slave narratives but secondary literature on the Horn of Africa slave trade and a surprising amount of information about the children as grown ups. The original narratives are included in the book alongside maps detailing the children’s first journey as slaves across Ethiopia. 
As they were transported across the Red Sea the children were freed by the British navy between 1888 and 1889. Scottish missionaries carefully wrote down their stories while they stayed at a Free Church of Scotland mission station at Sheikh Othman in Aden before they travelled down to South Africa.
Somewhere in the statistics, analysis, maps and careful conjecture Rowoldt Shell finds the children’s identity. Painstakingly she teases out where they came from, who their families were and what their likely cultural background could have been. Since the moment of capture was so indelibly imprinted on their minds, she could pinpoint quite a bit of information about what happened. 
This study questions some of the assumptions historians have made about the trade of slaves from the Horn of Africa, particularly around the concept of the first passage. Uniquely, the narratives provide a rare insight into this little-researched area of study – the first passage starts the moment the person is captured, it is that journey from capture to coast. 
While historians concluded a while back that slavery around the Horn of Africa concentrated more on children than adults, a large clutch of contemporary and systematic child slave narratives such as these Oromo accounts are virtually unknown. So, the possibility of a study like this is rare.
Then there is the approach – Rowoldt Shell translates the children’s stories into numbers and statistics to provide a glimpse into trends and patterns of this particular slave route even as she humanises them to tell their individual stories.
The children’s middle passage aboard dhows on the Red Sea lasted only a few hours and could not have accounted for their foreshortened life expectancy, placing the spotlight on the effects of the first passage as much more complex than previously assumed. So a second unique point of this study is the conjecture that the deaths on board the slave ships that crossed the Atlantic were not necessarily the result of the harsh middle passage (the boat trip) experience alone but may have been a consequence of the lengthy and gruelling first passage.
Rowoldt Shell’s findings suggest a rethink of the effects of this under-studied first passage, providing as she does such a nuanced picture of the first part of a slave’s journey. ​
Read more from Theresa.

Title: False River
Author: ​Dominique Botha
Reviewer: Gail Gilbride
Dominique and her beloved brother’s idyllic Free State childhood ends when boarding school far away becomes their reality. Their parents’ political opinions, coupled with Paul’s rebellious nature, have made schooling in the dorp challenging. Dominique is her brother’s faithful confidant and the extremely close relationship between the siblings is palpable.
Paul finds a way to express his turbulent emotions in poetry. His literary awakening opens up new worlds for him and for a while his life seems to be on track. When events turn against him, he flees the oppression of South Africa and starts again in London. But this new hope soon turns to unavoidable tragedy…
Dominique Botha’s heartbreaking novel of belonging and loss, is a courageous elegy to her brother as well as to a bygone way of life in a deeply divided South Africa.
Botha captures a particular place and time and explores the effects on her very real characters. Paul’s self-destructive spiral mirrors the birth-pains of the new democracy itself, as memories, political history and a cameo of rural life, are interwoven in an engrossing and convincing story.
Botha captures the haunting beauty of South Africa, in all its confusing contradictions. The universal themes of family loyalty, love, loss and new beginnings, make this a novel for everyone, wherever they are in the world.

Title: The Cure
Author: ​Joshua and Penny Castle
Reviewer: Gail Gilbride
A fast paced novella to tug at every heart string.
Adam is dying and his mother Bree, is offered a once in a lifetime opportunity to save him. How can she resist? Travelling to the future to bring back a mysterious parcel, seems like a fair deal.
The future is not how Bree imagined it and she is faced with an impossible dilemma. If she chooses to save her son, she puts the whole human race at risk. Bree would do anything to have Adam live, but the choice is taken out of her hands…
The authors take us on a mind boggling journey into the future and they keep the tension taut, from beginning to end. The fantasy is created with skill and a light touch, despite the sadness underpinning the tale.
I highly recommend this poignant read and suggest that you keep a tissue or two handy for the journey.
Well done Joshua and Penny!

Author: Vanessa Raphaely
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Reviewer: Nancy Richards
Some people are born to write a book  not any book, but a particular book, and Vanessa Raphaely was definitely starred for this one. So it’s set in the heart of women’s magazineland – and not only was Vanessa raised by magazine-pioneer mother Jane Raphaely, but she herself was both editor of Cosmo in South Africa and in London where she launched and edited a major health and beauty title. The point being, Vanessa knows what she’s talking about. Though hopefully she may be exaggerating just a little, in some instances anyway.
Plus One’s protagonist is South African-born Lisa Lassiter, deputy editor of glamour magazine Fille in London. ‘Plus One’ being the second-class title given to partners of the main invitees to posh events. Like for instance a weekend away off the coast of Mykonos on a billionaire’s yacht where Lisa is persuaded to go (as PO) with her best buddy, gorgeous golden movie star Claudia Hemmingway  As you may imagine on a yacht full of A listers, a great deal of cocaine and champagne is going down and Something Really Awful happens. From here, as if life in the style-society lane weren’t already spiked with backstabbing and bombshells, things start to seriously unravel.
Lisa and Claudia fall out big time and the lovely Ms Lassiter reinvents herself with restored dignity back in South Africa.  But bear in mind this is a crime novel in essence, well crime and passion perhaps – and unpacking that crime is, to coin a phrase, complicated – as is the passion. Claudia has a hot but uber-cool brother, Liam.
Whilst Vanessa will take you by Lisa’s manicured hand and guide you gasping through the air-kissing coke and couture set and their shenanigans – she has not been afraid to pull back the curtain on the dark side of celebrity – on power, deception and rape. Got you guessing? Yup, it will – right to the end.

Title: There Goes English Teacher (Modjaji, 2018)
Author: Karin Cronje
Reviewer: Nancy Richards
How many of us have felt the need to just get out of our rut and change direction. Well at the age of 48 in 2005, KARIN CRONJE felt the need big time – for a whole range of reasons. The direction in her case was South Korea – to teach English. Kind of random, but the universe had spoken. Amongst the reasons were that her son Marko’s Uni fees needed paying and she had a book to finish writing. Well, she went on to finish the book which despite all the grief it gave her, turned out to be an award-winner, and eventually her son got to finish his degree. But what happened in between was a journey of note, culture shock and a super-steep self-learning curve. When she left South Africa she was not prepared in any way for what lay ahead – she hardly knew where South Korea was and she had absolutely no teaching experience – plus she was leaving behind a perfectly good job (she had amongst other things, been a book publicist), a house and a much beloved, if aged dog.
So travelling this road with her – part stream of consciousness, part  journal (although she never wrote one) you want to laugh, cry, seethe and scream with her. She (and the reader) learn about Korean language and body language, their social and anti-social behaviour, eating habits, education methods, temples, history and attitudes. Marko comes to visit, she switches from teaching at a children’s ‘hagwon’ (cram school) to a university, she makes and looses friends, loves, hates – and eventually comes home, concluding with a section in which she has what she calls a break-through rather than a break down.
This is one roller coaster book – described on the (very lively and appealing) cover as ‘the full catastrophe of being human.’