Unleaving, Ingrid de Kok’s seventh collection of poetry, speaks of private grief, personal loss, ambiguity and hope, writes Finuala Dowling….
What does it mean to want grace after such a thing as apartheid? What might it look like? God’s Waiting…
Through the characters in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dream Count, we see our own blind spots and our audacity to hope,…
Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad is a powerful portrait of community resilience, recovery and hope in the face of overwhelming…
Available Light continues Daniel Magaziner’s significant work in shedding light on the lives of Black artists and intellectuals under apartheid,…
The Lions’ Den by Iris Mwanza is a historical thriller that reaches into many different corners of its characters’ lives,…
David Mann’s short story collection Once Removed is inventive, and in tune with what it means to be a young…
To read Karen Press’s Heart’s Hunger is not just to know where we have come from, but to feel in…
In My Friends, Hisham Matar hones in on the push and pull of friendships, their guiding light and the cushion-like…
Butter is keenly attuned to the many ways the private sphere runs on the disproportionate work of women while deliberately…
In Intermezzo, sexual tension and spiky wit give way to a deeper sense of tenderness and a lighter brand of…
Percy Zvomuya draws on Martin Plaut and Sarah Vaughan’s valuable new book Understanding Ethiopia’s Tigray War in a reading of…
As a novel centred on lesbian love set in an intensely homophobic country, These Letters End in Tears by Musih…
Percy Zvomuya reviews Mary E Ndlovu’s memoir, An Outsider Within: A Memoir of Love, of Loss, of Perseverance. An Outsider…
In Show Me the Place, Hedley Twidle displays an earnest curiosity about how to inhabit a world that seems to…
JM Coetzee’s late style has often been indifferently received, but The Pole is a beautifully elegant story, writes Wamuwi Mbao,…
Kim M Reynolds considers the historical and the personal in Uhuru Portia Phalafala’s new book Mine Mine Mine, in discussion…
Thandiwe Ntshinga’s Black Racist Bitch is the sort of book some readers will absolutely love, and others will find unreadable,…
Zikhona Valela reviews Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage by Jonny Steinberg. Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage…
In Yellowface, the contrast is turned up so brightly that the shadows disappear, writes Wamuwi Mbao, but it’s the darkness…
Eben Venter’s Decima is a novel in which morality is shown to be an intricately woven fabric of contesting needs…
Eye Brother Horn by Bridget Pitt is a South African novel immersed in our oral culture and traditions, writes Mphuthumi…
Daughter in Exile by Bisi Adjapon is a pacy, character-driven novel that surveys the many burdens of living as an…
George Hull reviews Against Decolonisation: Taking African Agency Seriously by Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò. Against Decolonisation: Taking African Agency SeriouslyOlúfẹ́mi TáíwòHurst &…
Wamuwi Mbao reviews The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt, a book that contains ‘one of the most alarmingly enjoyable…
Kyle Allan reviews Skin Rafts by Kelwyn Sole, a collection of poems that wrestle with a world that is connected…
Siphokazi Magadla reviews Violence and Solace: The Natal Civil War in Late-Apartheid South Africa by Mxolisi R Mchunu, a book…
The Inheritors by Eve Fairbanks is historical storytelling done well, writes Wamuwi Mbao. The InheritorsEve FairbanksJonathan Ball Publishers, 2023 David…
Sindi-Leigh McBride reviews Koleka Putuma’s Hullo, Bu-bye, Koko, Come In, a joy to behold even when the subject is devastating….
Carina Venter reviews Paula Fourie’s Mr Entertainment: The Story of Taliep Petersen, finding a life that encompasses a country and…
Believers and Hustlers by Sylva Nze Ifedigbo, winner of the Chinua Achebe Prize for Literature, explores the sinister underbelly of…
Ayanna Lloyd Banwo’s debut novel When We Were Birds makes compelling work of how a world in which the living…
Elif Batuman’s Either/Or is a new and worthy entry into the well-populated gallery of erudite books about people learning how…
Teamhw SbonguJesu’s debut collection of poetry, Bury Me Naked, delivers a conscientious, humorous, much-needed lesson in a poetics of voice…
Poli Poli by Barbara Masekela is a memoir that exemplifies the paradox of the ordinary and the spectacle in black…
The Blinded City by Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon is a lucidly fascinating immersion into the world of the people who occupy the…
Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah’s The Sex Lives of African Women is an important addition to writing that resists the fetishisation of…
Shayera Dark reviews Noor Naga’s experimental debut novel If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English, winner of the Graywolf Press Africa…
Kei Miller’s collection of essays Things I Have Withheld takes the measure of what it means to read and be…
Culture and Liberation: Exile Writings, 1966–1985Alex La GumaEdited by Christopher J LeeSeagull Books 1966 was an interesting year. Future Trump…
