Memoirs

Writing the Ancestral River is an illuminating and unusual biography of the Kowie River in the Eastern Cape. This tidal river runs through the centre of what used to be called the Zuurveld, a formative meeting ground of different peoples who have shaped our history: Khoikhoi herders, Xhosa pastoralists, Dutch trekboers and British settlers.

Educated and aspirational, with dreams of becoming a teacher, George Omona would seem an unlikely recruit for the Lord’s Resistance Army; a group which for many has become the embodiment of evil, reviled for its use of child soldiers, sexual slavery, for waging a decades long campaign of terror across a large swathe of Eastern and Central Africa.

A witty, poignant and candid memoir of one woman's dream of shedding her English inhibitions and becoming French.

At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade's training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. One day he was a doctor, the next he was a patient struggling to live. In this book, he offers a life-affirming reflection on facing our mortality and on the relationship between doctor and patient.

Jeremy Hall’s childhood in the white-ruled apartheid South Africa of the 1950s and ’60s was ostensibly idyllic: growing up in the farming areas of Natal, he had free rein to pander to his keen exploratory mind, yet niggling away was entrenched racism and interracial hatred.

It is November 1963. The white police state has captured almost all the underground leaders of the struggle against apartheid, including Nelson Mandela, and put them on trial on charges that carry the death penalty.