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Mail & Guardian

Jane Rosenthal

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Intrigue: Karin Brynard’s ‘Homeland’ is set in the Northern Cape and on the edge of the Kgalagadi park. There are deaths, cops, fortune seekers and those who have been denied their land. Photo: Madelene Cronjé

‘Homeland’ is a thriller,  but one with depth

Karin Brynard’s novel questions what outsiders have brought to the Khomani Bushmen, including those who profess to support them.

Unhu: Through telling a story, author Tsitsi Dangarembga looks at women’s varying views and and the dynamics between them

Dangarembga builds on her two earlier books

Here the protagonist is in her 30s, and she again narrates her story herself with an interesting distancing to reflect the divisions in her being.

Heimwee: Author Eben Venter revisits the Prince Albert area. In Green as the Sky is Blue, expat Simon Avend finds that returning to South Africa evokes old ghosts. Photo: Michael Hammond/Gallo Images/Foto24

An expat’s return explores intimacy

The novel deals with intimacy and trust, and finding one’s place in the world.

Earthly: Mphuthumi Ntabeni’s book traces Eastern Cape landscapes with their often bloody histories.

Mending severed histories with returning shades

This novel weaves colonial fact and ancestral memory in contemporary Eastern Cape life

Winnie Mandela: Home and dislocation

A novel look at diaspora and identity

Academic JU Jacobs explores South African stories that reveal who we are and our journeys here and elsewhere, both physically and psychologically.

The Compassionate Englishwoman zooms in on the Boer war by telling the life story  of Emily Hobhouse.

Compassion in the tragic quest for a colony

The Compassionate Englishwoman book is a post-retirement project by author Robert Eales about the Boer war.

Governments across sub-Saharan Africa violently pursue exiles abroad. Democracies must push back. (John McCann/M&G)

The Texture of Shadows: Beyond anger and retribution

Moving, memorable novel explores the life of ANC soldiers in exile and their return to SA shortly before Mandela’s release.

Of kleva dreams and integrity

Of kleva dreams and integrity

Jane Rosenthal on the urban intelligentsia in new novels from Perfect Hlongwane and Thando Mgqolozana.

District Six in Cape Town is the setting for Nadia Davids’s ‘An Imperfect Blessing’.

A blessing and the fighter’s lace

In a compelling novel and an engaging memoir, Jane Rosenthal finds richly textured accounts of Muslim and Indian experiences in South Africa.

Mapungubwe

Zakes Mda: The year of the mirror

Jane Rosenthal sculpts dreams and rides quaggas in the exotic kingdom of the sacred gold-plated rhino in Zakes Mda’s "The Sculptors of Mapungubwe".

Jane Rosenthal review four latest book released.

This broken land has many faces: A review of four books

Jane Rosenthal assesses four novels that cast the country in very different lights.

Up for awards: Books by Dominique Botha

End of the M-Net affair

The only book prize that celebrates works of ?fiction written in all of our official languages has been suspended.

False River by Dominique Botha. (Supplied)

Comfort is hard to find

A poignant debut novel reflects on life and love in a conservative farming community in the Free State.

Alice Munro: Simple but detailed stories. (Peter Muhly, AFP)

A basket of Munro scattered to the winds

Now that Alice Munro has won the Nobel Prize for Literature, her previously low profile in South Africa is bound to change.

The DA is to debate the issue of fracking in the Karoo after a resolution passed stated the party’s support for it

Harrowing story of an African farm

South African literature has a long tradition of farm novels digging deep into the lives of people on these farms.