Review: Vivien Horler A Stranger at Home, by Noni Jabavu (Tafelberg) When Athambile Masola, now a writer and academic at UCT, was a student in 2009, she was asked to write a regular column for East London’s Daily Dispatch newspaper. She wondered why there seemed to be so few black women writers and commentators, and began researching this. It emerged that black women had been writing for centuries, “but the colonial patriarchal framework in my education refused to acknowledge or see these women’s voices as valuable”. Her research uncovered the Xhosa writer and journalist Noni Jabavu, who grew ..read more

Review: Vivien Horler A Dangerous Business, by Jane Smiley (Abacus Books) Being a woman is a dangerous business, says Mrs Parks, and she should know. She runs a brothel the Monterey of 1851, a port town a couple of days south of San Francisco, peopled by American settlers, Spaniards, Portuguese, indigenous Californians, British sailors and “priests and Presbyterians”. There are seven or eight men to every woman. Mrs Parks is a kindly madam, for which Eliza Ripple is grateful. At 18, Eliza was married off by her parents in Michigan to Peter Cargill, a man who seemed prosperous and respectable ..read more

THESE ARE AMONG the books that landed on my desk this month.  Some will be reviewed in full later. The first three are from Exclusive Books’ top 25 reads for February. There was a fourth book, A Dangerous Business by Pulitzer prize-winning Jane Smiley, which I’ll review on Sunday. – Vivien Horler How to Stand up to a Dictator – The fight for our future, by Maria Ressa (WH Allen) Just a quick read of the foreword – by Amal Clooney – and the prologue by Filipino journalist Maria Ressa make one realise how important this book is. In 2021 Ressa, along with Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov, w ..read more

Review: Vivien Horler Rhoda – A biography, by Joel B Pollak (UJ Press) Mention Rhoda Kadalie’s name in any group and you will get an opinion, often several. She was bright, determined, outspoken, and didn’t care if she alienated people with her views – she believed in speaking her truth, loudly. She was a fierce defender of human rights, she launched the Gender Equity Unit at the University of the Western Cape, she was by all accounts a wonderful mother to her daughter, Julia Pollak, and a great cook. She was extraordinarily articulate, and would say things others would not. On the few occasio ..read more

Review: Vivien Horler The Milk Tart Murders – A Tannie Maria mystery, by Sally Andrew (Umuzi/ Penguin Random House) Jirre but Tannie Maria has a sweet tooth. It starts on page one with a lemon drizzle cake (okay, I quite like a lemon drizzle cake, the tarter the better), creamy fudge on page three, red velvet cake on page 16 (interestingly, Tannie Maria discovers, the recipe has vinegar in the batter as well as buttermilk), and then it goes on, to milk tart with naartjie peel, spekboom ice cream, milkshakes, soetkoekies, chocolate fridge cake… Personally I prefer tea and homemade fish paste to ..read more

Review: Beryl Eichenberger My Thirty-Minute Barmitzvah, by Denis Hirson (Jacana) Anyone who has an even rudimentary knowledge of this Jewish rite of passage would know that the barmitzvah ceremony and subsequent celebration can last for hours. It is such an important milestone for both boys and girls (who have bat mitzvahs), shaping much of their lives ahead. So it was with curiosity that I approached My Thirty-Minute Barmitvah by Denis Hirson. What a simply beautifully crafted book. A slim volume with an engaging cover that gives the feel of an old-fashioned read, this is a real gem of memoir ..read more

Vivien Horler Wherever you go these days you see red balloons, hearts and chocolates – it’s looking very like the month of love. And it doesn’t have to be love for a person – as a colleague quipped: “Oh books, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways…” Exclusive Books has seized the opportunity to mark Valentine’s Day on February 14 with a selection of books about love, from how to do it right, how to make your relationship deeper and more spiritual, to some jokey pun books. And then of course there are always the shelves of love stories, and poetry, starting with Elizabeth Barrett Browning ..read more

Review: Vivien Horler The Lindbergh Nanny, by Mariah Fredericks (Headline Review) The Light We Left Behind, by Tessa Harris (HQ/HarperCollins) Two reviews for the price of one this week. I’ve combined them because while these novels tell vastly different stories, both are based on real-life events of the past century, and make absorbing reading. The Lindbergh Nanny is the tale of the kidnapping and death of Charlie Lindbergh, the toddler son of the at-the-time beyond famous aviator Charles Lindbergh, the first man to fly solo non-stop across the Atlantic from New York to Paris. In 1927, when h ..read more

Review: Vivien Horler Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver (faber) It is years since I read Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, and I have a feeling I skipped a chunk in the middle. But I do remember the bleakness of the young David’s life, the sense of hopelessness, the poverty, the cruelty and the callousness of Dickensian England. Long gone now. And yet. Bestselling author Barbara Kingsolver has reworked the narrative, setting it in impoverished hillbilly country in the US’s Appalachia, and adding a lot of drugs, particularly opioids. We end up with an entirely credible modern-day story ..read more

These are among the books that have landed on my desk this month.  Some will be reviewed in full later. The first four are among Exclusive Books’s top reads for January. Whatever Next? – Lesson from an unexpected life, by Anne Glenconner (Hodder & Stoughton) Not many people would have the optimism, at the age of 90, to write a book titled Whatever Next? And Anne Glenconner is certainly not thinking of the obvious. She has lived a life of money and prestige, being the daughter of the Earl of Leicester and the widow of Lord Glenconner (better known to tabloid readers as Colin Tennant of ..read more