​Véronique Tadjo is a writer, poet and painter from the Ivory Coast, who has lived all over Africa. She was visiting professor at Wits University. She is a prolific writer with many awards and the release in 2021 of her latest novel in translation, In the Company of Men: the Ebola Tales draws on real accounts of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa of 2014. She considers herself a Pan-African so is eminently placed to write about this scourge that has attacked African countries
And while all this might sound depressing it is so far from that. Tadjo’s ability to weave folk tale and reality brings together an almost magical yet harshly honest series of stories - moving insights into the devastation and effect on those closest to the virus. She has a measured voice, the poetic quality is sorrowful, sad and an elegy to those who have passed and a hymn for those who have survived. 
In West Africa the de-forestation has affected the biodiversity in such a way as to allow disease to spread. Tadjo illustrates this effect as she follows two young boys through the stripped woods as they hunt bats for food; the Baobab speaks to us; the whispering trees echo the broken chain between man and nature; a doctor; nurse, survivor, the virus itself – all have a story and whether it is the stigma of having had the virus, the absence of supplies, the bravery, the fear, each has a voice.  It is the simplicity of the stories that enthrals. And cuts to the heart.
I must mention the cover as this is something that also sets the book apart. The Baobab tree with all is its intricate appendages is both unsettling and intriguing.  
Tadjo uses poetry, fictionalised testimonials, and beautifully constructed prose to paint this picture of a disease that in 2014 claimed more than 11000 lives. She points to the effects of pandemics and epidemics and how man contributes to this cycle.  And she brings the reality of this crisis into focus. 
As the giant Baobab says; ‘But when men murder us, they must know that they are breaking the chains of existence. Animals can no longer find food. Bats can no longer find food, can no longer find the wild fruit they like so much. Then they migrate to villages, where there are mango, guava, papaya and avocado trees, with their soft sweet fruits. The bats seek the company of men’.
 Tadjo has presented us with sobering stories that have an important place in this world we inhabit – they remind us of our hand in the destruction.   
This book won Veronique Tadjo  the Los Angeles Times Book Prize 2021.  

conspiracy. Everyone you know, all your contemporaries are expecting or have babies. And every woman on the street, even those who probably don’t want or can’t afford another child, seem to be in the family way. It’s just not fair. But it is a reality.
‘Infertility affects millions of couples globally.’ Daminda says in her book. It doesn’t help you to know that, but generally knowledge does help.
‘I also had a difficult journey to motherhood’ she continues, ‘doctors kept telling me there was no reason I could not fall pregnant naturally, yet I didn’t. The fact that I never had a reason, a condition to blame for my infertility, drove me insane.’ But it’s also what led her to finding out more, to founding a fertility consulting and coaching business, and writing this book
She admits that all the information in the book can be overwhelming – she also says up front that it is not intended to diagnose or take the place of medical advice. But there are things you can do and what she offers here is an eight-pillar guide – the first and key pillar being The Power of knowledge. Followed by The role of your immune system; Hormones gone haywire: take control of PCOS; Banish chronic inflammation; Take action; It’s all in the preparation; What’s up with the man and Your future.  
There’s way too much info to isolate the one thing that may be affecting you – but one that is affecting the fertility of many these days is PCOS or polycystic ovary syndrome. In the last 20 years the incidence has risen by over 30%. The four most common types are: insulin-resistant; birth-control pill induced; inflammatory and hidden, with the most common causes being hereditary; surplus insulin and low-grade inflammation.
There’s much on the subjects of ph levels, medication, cells, supplements, blood groups, antioxidants, diet and exercise. As well as, on that sensitive area, understanding and countering male infertility. It does after all take two to tango. But most importantly there is much advice on how YOU can be proactive, not least by building your support team. At the back is a Resource Library with tracking charts – but especially encouraging on the first and last pages are the words DON’T GIVE UP. ​

divorces, a gradual sexual awakening, Kim found herself at 40 something virtually unemployed, with all the time in the world to write, sip gin and study a general response to one of the world’s most draconian lockdowns’. I don’t know where she got the gin in those dark, dry days, but Kim sure knows how to write. Her book is a chuckle, a weep, utterly relatable and an education in itself, on so many levels.
So what is it all about – and how did it begin? Well, first part – it’s a series of facebook posts written between April 2020 and April 2022 and interspersed with what are called ‘observations’ or reflections on, for eg: Truth, Cele, Marriage, Body Issues, Running etc etc. Second part – it began, sort of, in January 2016 with a facebook post that went viral called Dear Mr President, I think it’s time you go for a run. It suggested that if CR hit the streets he might see the country for exactly what it is. The piece was republished, to much acclaim, in Brent Lindeque’s Good Things Guy as Brent himself reveals in his foreword.
It was her own running that triggered the Dear Mr President post, and in the dedicated chapter she says declares that ‘it changed every element of me.’ Like some people put the kettle on in moments of stress, Kim ran.
In a subsequent irresistible fb post, dated May 2020, she puts South Africans into 10 categories and in another chapter, South Africa and Power, she says ‘I love this country with all my heart but sometimes it’s an unfathomable shit show.’ So you see where she’s at in terms of social commentary.
But she gets more personal. In a chapter called Can we skip to the good part, she says ‘My very available parents have been with me for so many life traumas, celebrations and realisations…but… I wish I had been able to anchor my truth sooner. I’ve been through many journeys of therapy…and in my most recent I was diagnosed as having ADHD.’ She describes her first teenage pregnancy and goes on to describe how she met a beautiful, strong warm-hearted woman with a six-year old daughter’ and eventually found ‘absolute peace in my gayness’. These are open and honest reflections.
Towards the end of the book she shares some of her life learnings, earned the hard way, not least coping with pregnancy just prior to writing matric. Also, ‘You can be straight as Bok de Blerk on national braai day, and still be chilled about gay people having the right to get married.’
Finally she thanks everyone who has supported and loved her through it all. But the lesson I learned from Kim’s writing is that as a parent you must accept the fact that you can open doors for your kids, but they will choose which ones they want to go through, and how. But also that whatever kindness, hardness, wisdom, truth or lie you put in is most often what will come out – and it seems to me that while that Kim may well have had a lot of privilege in her life (which she owns to several times), she has also had a great deal of love, care and role models that have given her the freedom to share and to be.
Very finally, this book may represent a moment in time in our country, and in one woman’s life, but it has some enduring insight.  
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​unravelling – she becomes more and more confused, gets lost, locks herself out of her house – and Solnit and her brothers have to pack their mother up and move her into a seniors’ home. The apricots become a metaphor that runs throughout the book – for abundance but also for a kind of inheritance from her mother that she has to sift through, discard what is rotten, or bottle, can and preserve.
Alongside the apricots, is a trip to Iceland that she goes on as she learnt as a young woman, “never to turn down an adventure without a really good reason” and the story takes off in another direction.
Ultimately, this is a book about writing and storytelling. “Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them”, she says, and to be without a story is to be well and truly lost. We ourselves are stories and in the strongest stories we see ourselves and our connection to others through story and empathy, she adds. Ironically, her mother is losing the stories that she lived by and it changes their relationship that was always fraught with difficulties.
Solnit writes with empathy and compassion about her relationship with her mother. The book is both deeply personal and philosophical. I was interested to see the book is classified as memoir/anti-memoir. An anti-memoir is less about the author and more about the reader and this book resonated with me on many levels.

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​‘ My name is Frankie Elkin and finding missing people is what I do. When the police have given up, when the public no longer remembers, when the media has never bothered to care, I start looking. For no money, no recognition, and most of the time, no help.’ This is the protagonist of Lisa Gardner’s new novel ‘One step too far’ and we are about to embark on a journey of terrifying reality.
Frankie, middle aged white woman, recovering alcoholic, loner, has once again earmarked a missing person and she’s making plans to join the search team.  She has a talent for finding missing persons – it makes her put one step in front of the other on any given day. Her success rate is impressive (even if they were mostly bodies) but it is her empathy for the families of these people that spurs her to search ‘cold’ cases.
Timothy O’ Day is one such case. Five years since he was lost in the mountains after his bachelor party camping trip. There is no closure in this case and his father and three of his friends who were with him on the fateful night , Scott, Neil and Miguel, are once again heading to the mountains for yet another annual foray. With canine searcher Daisy, her handler Luciana, local expert Nemeth and volunteer Bigfoot Bob, dad Martin O’Day has gathered an experienced team for this final search. And the very inexperienced Frankie joins it. The resulting journey is well – hang on to your hat - chilling, visceral and gut-wrenching.
It is clear that Gardner is a seasoned hiker. I learnt an enormous amount about safety measures, what you pack, how to stay alive, rules of the hiking fraternity and so much more – it makes for fascinating reading and Gardner is a clever guide. Opening preparations alert Frankie as to the emotional undercurrents of the party but all seems fairly stable as Nemeth sets out on the path. This is a gruelling hike as we move into the mountains of the Shoshone National Forest in Wyoming to a fictional destination - Devil’s Canyon. And the key is in the devil … I walked with them, felt their fears, held my breath and wept with the frustrating failures. Suffice to say Gardner has produced an unpredictable page turner which will most certainly have your nails bitten down to the quick.  
When nature’s agenda for protecting its own comes up against human manipulation the battle begins.  Step by excruciating step the secrets of the mountain are revealed and, as the hunters face one setback after another, when food goes missing, ugly screams are heard at night and no seeming answers they slowly realise that they have become the prey and the game is on…

​understanding of others. If only – and this was the big one - they could express themselves and their beliefs so articulately and with such passion as Shanti. Shanti is the young woman, the protagonist of this book who at the tender age of fourteen makes the decision, in order to avoid a forced and arranged marriage, to sail from the Madras Presidency in India to Port Natal in South Africa to become an indentured labourer in the British-owned sugarcane plantations. A reminder, she was fourteen years old. She was alone. And this was 1916. Imagine! Just imagine, apart from anything else, the interminable sea voyage shared with the hope, struggling and suffering of a shipful of others.
There is a speech, a full page long, that Shanti gives towards the end of the book, that is nothing short of sizzling. To an unsympathetic, largely hostile audience, she delivers a heartfelt and impassioned cry, a demand for justice, rights and understanding (and all this in English, not her mother tongue), that had me punching the air in her honour. If only, I thought, all young women could find the words to express themselves so powerfully and clearly.
To my mind, Joanne Joseph’s book epitomises power and passion. It seems to me that the passion she had for writing this story – a collective of so many people’s narratives, and one that for her was triggered by an internet image she found of her maternal great-grandmother, was what led her to undergo a total immersion into the ‘rabbit-holes’ of her family’s history as well as the deep waters of specialist academics who have written extensively on Indian indenture in the 19th century. In turn the passion gave her the power to piece together this layered story in way that makes it so accessible.  It also enabled her to breathe power and passion into Shanti making her both impressive and inspirational. If only young women, then and now, could have half as much confidence and clout. If ever I were looking for a speech writer Joanne Joseph would be top of my list.

​of real women known to the author’. Which was a bit of a shock. The things that protagonist Obianuju goes through at the hands of her dapper, church-going husband shouldn’t happen to…well, just shouldn’t happen. And what she tolerates from the mouth of her traditional and unbending mother just shouldn’t be said. That it all takes place between 1978 and 1999 makes you hope that perhaps these things don’t happen anymore. But hey…lets look at our own GBV statistics and opinions on what constitutes a woman’s role before we start pointing fingers.
The years covered mean that it post-dates the Biafran war (1967-1970) that if you read Chimamanda Adichi’s ‘alf of a Yellow Sun. you may remember was harrowingly central. But the stain of war, any war, lingers and the Biafran conflict crops up as one of the themes in this book. Interestingly Aiwanose participated in Adichi’s Purple Hibiscus Trust Writing Workshop. So who knows what influences or not may have been at play, but this book feels very much her own and based on what she has witnessed.
One of the other relationship themes that runs through ‘Become a Woman’ is that of female friends. Well in the book ‘Wahala’, also a debut novel by Anglo-Nigerian writer Nikki May, a group of ‘inseparable mixed-race friends’ living in London take the leading roles. So it’s full-on female. And set in the present day, it’s about as contemporary as it gets, ‘Boo tapped her nails on the steel of her laptop’, and life is a million miles from decades-past downtown Lagos. ‘… Simi spent Saturday afternoon in the Cowshed spa… three hours – salt scrub, reflexology, deep tissue massage and hydro-gel mask facial.’ But it’s also laced with Nigerian nostalgia ‘You’re such a coconut. I’ll have amala with ogbomo and assorted meat.’ ‘Jollof rice and chicken for me,’ said Ronke. She couldn’t bring herself to order pounded yam in front of skinny, glamourous Isobel.’ And then there’s the inimitable dialogue, ‘Na your choice be dat. I go make you handbag and headwrap. The aso ebi be like entry ticket – it shows you belong.’
What the two books have in common is that they are both indicators of the painful and poignant world of women – but unlike ‘Become a woman’, ‘Wahala’ is wickedly, if agonizingly, funny.
The reason for talking about them in the same breath so to speak, is that they are both so very much  ‘of Nigeria’ – and both offer such female insight. In addition they are a testimony to how culture can impact your life as a woman – then as now, and wherever you are.
Oh, and while there’s no glossary at the back of ‘Wahala’, there are some recipes to add flavour, including ‘Ronke’s Jollof Rice’.