Gwen Ansell

Gwen Ansell reviews <i>Red Mandarin Dress</i>, the fifth of the Inspector Chen novels.

Every writer of feminist speculative fiction owes a debt to Ursula le Guin, whose 1974 The Dispossessed neatly turned conventional notions of gender, power and property rights upside down. That debt is explicitly acknowledged by Liz Williams -- even if the first fantastic novels she remembers reading were by Jack Vance.

Joe Abercrombie's Before They Are Hanged: Book Two of the First Law (Gollancz) puts some very modern preoccupations -- the nature of war and the motivation of torturers -- under the fantasy glass. His main protagonists are, in his own words, ''a crippled torturer, a sneering, self-serving nobleman and a psychopathic barbarian with a bloody history'', writes Gwen Ansell.

<i>Mail & Guardian</i> reviewers examine meaning and myth in Mmatshilo Motsei's The Kanga and the Kangaroo Court

<b>Lisa Johnston</b> reviews Kleinboer's <i>Midnight Missionary</i>.

Marianne MertenVoting is still a tale of two cities on the Cape Peninsula where just a busy highway makes all the difference.In the...

JAZZ: Gwen Ansell