‘Many murky fixations bob to the surface’—Wamuwi Mbao reviews Dominique Botha’s The Crying Bride & Other Hallucinations
Wamuwi Mbao reviews The Crying Bride & Other Hallucinations by Dominique Botha, a keenly alive collection from the new Painted…
Tag: Book Reviews
‘The haunted house becomes the colony in miniature’—Fifi Bat-hef reviews Nadia Davids’s Cape Fever
Fifi Bat-hef reviews Cape Fever by Nadia Davids, a slow-burning gothic tale of a young Cape Malay woman in service…
‘A reluctant, complicated love story spanning the globe and a myriad natural disasters’—Barbara Boswell reviews Ice Shock by Elleke Boehmer
Barbara Boswell reviews Elleke Boehmer’s Ice Shock, a novel saturated with extremes of love and increasingly calamitous climate events. Ice…
‘Always in search of uncompromising honesty in a compromised and compromising world’—Kevin Goddard reviews Kelwyn Sole’s latest collection of poetry, What is Owed?
Kevin Goddard reviews What is Owed? by Kelwyn Sole—a poet’s summing up of a life dedicated both to verse and…
Can we engage with power without being corrupted by it? Sean Jacobs reviews Mahmood Mamdani’s new book, Slow Poison: Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni, and the Making of the Ugandan State
Sean Jacobs reviews Slow Poison by Mahmood Mamdani, a rich and textured account of Ugandan and postcolonial African politics, and…
A sparkling reflection on friendship, women’s bodies and the vestiges of colonialism—Shayera Dark reviews Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s new novel Dream Count
Through the characters in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dream Count, we see our own blind spots and our audacity to hope,…
Storytelling as a point of departure for resistance—Hassana Moosa reviews Isabella Hammad’s new novel Enter Ghost
Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad is a powerful portrait of community resilience, recovery and hope in the face of overwhelming…
Omar Badsha: an ordinary South African whose struggles and triumphs offer insights into broader social movements—Sean Jacobs reviews Available Light by Daniel Magaziner
Available Light continues Daniel Magaziner’s significant work in shedding light on the lives of Black artists and intellectuals under apartheid,…
Hiding in Plain Sight: Cold War Interventions into African Literature—Bhakti Shringarpure reviews Monica Popescu’s At Penpoint: African Literatures, Postcolonial Studies, and the Cold War
Monica Popescu’s At Penpoint: African Literatures, Postcolonial Studies, and the Cold War is a steadfast engagement with the cultural Cold…
To move about in an unkind world under the mark of racial blackness—Wamuwi Mbao reviews Scatterlings, the debut novel by Rešoketšwe Manenzhe
Wamuwi Mbao reviews Rešoketšwe Manenzhe’s novel Scatterlings, winner of the 2020 Dinaane Debut Fiction Award. ScatterlingsRešoketšwe ManenzheJacana Media, 2020 There…
African literature should be free to remain ‘a question to itself’—Lebohang Mojapelo reviews The Rise of the African Novel by Mukoma Wa Ngugi
In The Rise of the African Novel, Mukoma Wa Ngugi traces the way African literature has been a space to…
A Cape tragedy—Stephen Langtry reviews Martin Plaut’s new book Dr Abdullah Abdurahman: South Africa’s First Elected Black Politician
Whether we have learnt from the story of Dr Abdullah Abdurahman remains to be seen, writes Stephen Langtry. Martin Plaut’s…
Board the Eastern Main Line and go to work in Hell—Richard Poplak reviews The Night Trains, Charles van Onselen’s finest book yet
Richard Poplak reviews The Night Trains by Charles van Onselen, a book grounded in the hard work of scouring the…
Welcome to The Johannesburg Review of Books
It gives me great pleasure to introduce The Johannesburg Review of Books, a new literary review from southern Africa. Our…