Tannie Maria might be the Karoo’s favourite agony aunt, but when it comes to matters of her own heart, she doesn’t have all the answers. Why is she having trouble telling her beau – the dashing Detective Henk Kannemeyer with the chestnut moustache – that she loves him? There are other, more pressing problems too. A tall, dark stranger zooms in on her Ducati motorbike: she is Zabanguni Kani, a journalist renowned for her political exposés, who, after receiving threats, moves in with Tannie…

The Longest March by Khumalo, Fred | Penguin Random House South Africa

A Sin of Omission by Poland, Marguerite | Penguin Random House South Africa

In the spring of 1970, a Pretoria schoolboy falls in love with Muhammad Ali. He begins to collect cuttings about his hero from the newspapers, an obsession that grows into a ragged archive of scrapbooks. Forty years later, when Joe has become a writer, these scrapbooks both insist on and obscure a book about his boyhood. He turns to his brother Branko, a sound editor, for help with recovering their shared past. But can a story ever belong equally to two people? Is this a brotherly…

In the Eastern Cape, a schoolgirl maths prodigy is haunted by the loss of her mother, who disappeared during the demise of the country’s homeland system. When a strange apparition – “the machine” – visits the girl at night, she’s convinced it’s a sign from her mother, and connected to a series of abductions of local girls. With her two closest friends, she sets out to find the truth, exposing links to the area’s murky past. Are her visions disturbed hallucinations to be medicated…

The Great Farini would stride on to the stage and announce, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, and now for the highlight of the day, the ferocious Zulus.’ The impresario Farini introduced Em-Pee and his troupe to his kind of show business, and now they must earn their bread. In 1885 in a bustling New York City, they are the performers who know the true Zulu dances, while all around them fraudsters perform silly jigs. Reports on the Anglo-Zulu War portrayed King Cetshwayo as infamous, and…

When thirteen-year-old Zuri begins cutting herself, psychologist Ana is called in to help. Is the troubled girl trying to relieve the tension of being black in a predominantly white private school? And how healthy is Zuri’s relationship with Helen, the white single mom who adopted her? Struggling to soften Zuri’s defences during the course of the therapy, Ana must piece together the puzzles of both Helen and her daughter, including the truth of what happened to Zuri’s biological mother…

But Deliver Us from Evil tells the story of two young women whose lives converge at a crucial juncture. The story opens in 1870, when Nthebolang’s father is unjustly accused of being a witch and sentenced to death. After he has been ritually thrown off a high cliff, Nthebolang and her mother are forced to flee. Beatrice, a fair-skinned Koranna girl, has lost her parents to captors in ongoing conflicts with the white settlers. When she moves to the small village of Nstweng, she meets…

“Hillbrow, 1967. The New York of Africa. Someone wrote that the place would soon have more people per square kilometre than Tokyo. Everyone quoted that article to everyone. Some even cut it out and kept it folded in their wallets.” While other boys daydream about racing cars and football, eleven-year-old stutterer Phen sits reading to his father. In number four Duchess Court, Phen’s dad looks like a Spitfire pilot behind his oxygen mask. But real life is different from the daring…

Murder is on the menu. Detective Storm van der Merwe and Andreas Moerdyk are back in this brand-new thriller by Irna van Zyl, author of Dead in the Water. Storm now works in Hermanus and during a lunch with her friend at Zebardines, a much-hated food blogger keels over and dies. It turns out that there were deadly mushrooms, death cups, in her food. Finding out who killed the blogger is Storm’s first priority, but not the only matter requiring her attention: her old colleague…

From the moment 26-year-old Tristan Hansen steps out of the shower and onto the roof garden of his Maboneng loft, Toy Boy pulsates with eroticism. The air is hot and humid, and there’s a Joburg thunderstorm brewing on the horizon. The first flashes of lightning illuminates Tristan’s spectacular flat and the riches it contains: gifts of thanks from his many clients, tokens of their appreciation. Because Tristan is an angel of pleasure, an exclusive escort to Johannesburg’s rich and powerful…

Set in Natal in the nineteenth century among the settlers and the homesteaders and the sugar-cane farmers, Claire Robertson’s masterful new novel Under Glass tells the story of Mrs Chetwyn, who arrives in Port Natal from India in 1856. She is with her eldest daughter and her ayah, and has been travelling for eleven months to join her husband, already deep in the hinterland. Her father-in-law has staked them their passage, a sum for settlement and an arrangement for the purchase of land…

A Thousand Tales of Johannesburg is Harry Kalmer’s spellbinding ode to Johannesburg and its people. This is the story of Sara, who poses stiffly for a photo with her four children at Turffontein concentration camp in 1901, and of Abraham, who paints the street names on Johannesburg’s kerbs. It is the tale of their grandson Zweig, a young architect who has to leave Johannesburg when he falls in love with the wrong person, and of Marceline, a Congolese mother who flees to the city only to be…

When Karl wakes up in a dilapidated house on the outskirts of a South African mining town, he does not know who or where he is, but it’s clear that the townsfolk know him. Next door lives a ten-year-old boy, Henry. Henry’s father is a violent drug-dealer, his mother helpless in protecting them against him. A gap in the hedge between the two houses allows Henry to slip into Karl’s yard, and Karl and Henry strike up a gentle friendship as glimpses of Karl’s troubled past and his time…

Brilliant jazz pianist Bent lives from gig to gig in a city of dead ends. He is plagued by fragmented visions of the past, and has resigned himself to a life of quiet desolation. That is, until the night he meets wealthy and eccentric jazz fan Leonard Fry. In the days that follow, Leonard makes Bent a devilish deal, proposing a bizarre experiment in which Bent will play a vital part. The deal provides an opportunity for Bent to start afresh, to question everything he knows, and for the…