Holding power to account
Arundhati Roy does not flinch from facing the void. Her second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, takes us deep into the contradictions within Indian society. Northern India at least, for the novel centres on Delhi, which in itself has a surfeit of human nature’s dark side.… Read more
Home Affairs by Onyeka Nwelue
Lethabo Khumalo, a weary Home Affairs official in Pietermaritzburg, is a mother of three who has long carried life alone until a chance encounter draws her into a web of corruption that promises relief from the quiet depression of unpaid bills and leaking roofs.… Read more
Liwa Ekimakingaï sits atop his grave, having been hurled there by a cyclone that sucked him out of the earth. At only 24-years-old, and wearing an orange crepe jacket, fluorescent-green shirt and purple flared trousers, Liwa realises he has died, and has been dreaming of his death.… Read more
Set mostly in the Klein Karoo, beautifully written, atmospheric and irresistibly intriguing, The Fourth Boy explores notions of belonging and a myriad of other longings which I found profoundly moving. It tells the story of a young man’s search for his father against the backdrop of the 80s in apartheid South Africa and the fate of five hundred Polish WWII refugee children who arrived in Oudtshoorn in 1943 – a piece of local history I have been fascinated by for as long as I have lived in South Africa.… Read more
Rarely does a novel teach you to listen. There is a scene in Richard Powers’s Orfeo in which the protagonist, avante-garde composer Peter Els, presents his final undergraduate composition at a famed music school in rural Indiana to his tutor, Karol Kopacz.… Read more
The fourth sentence is cliched and the second sentence has a contradiction in the tenses. This is the kind of thing that happens when you have to self publish because publishing houses don’t want to put out a book that depicts a town in Limpopo circa 1990 (when it was still the northern Transvaal) too realistically.… Read more
The Western is a well-trodden genre, defined as much by place and time as by character and plot. So much part of the American myth of freedom and self-sufficiency, it is arguably become part of the United States’s propaganda arsenal. Of course, we swallow it, for the most part, probably because the story of lone man battling nature and other men (it is almost always men in the Western) segues so well with the Greek narrative arc of journey, conflict, and resolution.… Read more
It is a rare feat, to successfully write a Gothic novel that is comic and tragic, along with the element of horror that is bound within the genre. That is, if you want to assign a genre to Sven Axelrad’s debut novel, Buried Treasure.… Read more
By Rod Amner
“When we allow self-evident truths to percolate past our defences and into our consciousness, they are treated like so many hand grenades rolling across the dance floor of an improbably macabre party.… Read more
Not thinking about death – our own and that of the people we love – is probably a mechanism of the mind that prevents us from being paralysed by its inevitability. Although, paradoxically, death can provide the impetus to enjoy life while we have it, and to find the kind of perspective that allows us to gracefully deal with the daily frustrations and irritations that accompany a beating heart.… Read more