It all begins with a hot air balloon trip and three bottles of champagne. Allan and Julius are ready for some spectacular views, but they’re not expecting to land in the sea and be rescued by a North Korean ship, and they could never have imagined that the captain of the ship would be harbouring a suitcase full of contraband uranium, on a nuclear weapons mission for Kim Jong-un …
Soon Allan and Julius are at the centre of a complex diplomatic crisis involving world figures from the Swedish foreign minister to Angela Merkel and President Trump. Things are about to get very complicated …
Praise for The Hundred-Year-Old Man:
‘A mordantly funny and loopily freewheeling debut novel about ageing disgracefully’ Sunday Times
‘Imaginative, laugh-out-loud . . . a brilliant satire on the foibles of mankind’ Daily Telegraph
‘Fast-moving and relentlessly sunny’ Guardian
“The Leftovers is, simply put, the best Twilight Zone episode you never saw.” ―Stephen King, New York Times Book Review
“[Perrotta's] most mature, absorbing novel, one that confirms his development from a funnyman to a daring chronicler of our most profound anxieties and human desires...Leavened with humor and tinged with creepiness, this insightful novel draws us into some very dark corners of the human psyche.” ―Washington Post
“[Perrotta's] most ambitious book to date....The premise is as simple as it is startling (certainly for the characters involved). The novel is filled with those who have changed their lives radically or discovered something crucial about themselves, as radical upheaval generates a variety of coping mechanisms. Though the tone is more comic than tragic, it is mainly empathic, never drawing a distinction between "good" and "bad" characters, but recognizing all as merely human--ordinary people dealing with an extraordinary situation.” ―Kirkus Reviews (starred)
“Ever since Little Children, Tom Perrotta has been a master chronicler of suburban ennui, but he takes things to a new level with his wry, insightful, unputdownable novel The Leftovers...Profoundly entertaining...The Leftovers brims with joy, hilarity, tenderness and hope.” ―Marie Claire
“An engrossing read.” ―People
“The Leftovers is sort of an 'Our Town' for End Times. Tom Perrotta, our Balzac of the burbs, has come up with a wild premise for his engaging, entertaining new novel. Suddenly, a huge number of people vanish from this earth. The only explanation is that The Rapture has occurred...He narrows his affectionate and gently satiric focus to the middle-American village of Mapleton and shows us a bunch of folks trying to get on with their lives...The novel intertwines these stories at a graceful pace in prose so affable that the pages keep turning without hesitation. With Perrotta at the controls, you buy the set-up and sit back as he takes off.” ―Chicago Sun Times
“Perrotta combines absurd circumstance and authentic characters to wondrous effect, turning his story into a vivid exploration of what we believe, what matters most, and how, if untethered, we move on...Perrotta treats his characters with sympathy and invites the reader to do the same.” ―Seattle Times
“In his provocative new novel Tom Perrotta dives straight into our unease...it's a gentle, Perrotta-esque go at sci-fi, without any mangled bodies or bombed-out buildings; it's a realistic novel built on a supernatural foundation.” ―Boston Globe
“Perrotta's gift is his ability to infuse satire with warmth, to find significance in the absurd. It's easy to mock extreme forms of religious expression. It's harder to find their meaning and application. Perrotta does both in this rich and oddly reassuring read.” ―More Magazine
“The best book about the Rapture since the New Testament.” ―"The Bullseye" in Entertainment Weekly
“Start with what the author calls a Rapture-like phenomenon, mix in some suburban angst, and poof: All other apocalyptic fiction gets blown away.” ―O, The Oprah Magazine (selected as one of the Best Fiction titles of 2011)
In an unnamed city, middle sister stands out for the wrong reasons. She reads while walking, for one. And she has been taking French night classes downtown. So when a local paramilitary known as the milkman begins pursuing her, she suddenly becomes “interesting,” the last thing she ever wanted to be. Despite middle sister’s attempts to avoid him―and to keep her mother from finding out about her maybe-boyfriend―rumors spread and the threat of violence lingers. Milkman is a story of the way inaction can have enormous repercussions, in a time when the wrong flag, wrong religion, or even a sunset can be subversive. Told with ferocious energy and sly, wicked humor, Milkman establishes Anna Burns as one of the most consequential voices of our day.
On September 6, 1966, Dimitri Tsafendas stabbed to death Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd. Afterwards, Tsafendas was declared to be a schizophrenic who believed a tapeworm lived inside him which controlled his actions, and that he had no political motive for assassinating Verwoerd. Tsafendas went down in history as a deranged parliamentary messenger.
For fifty years, this story prevailed. However, this book now reveals the truth about Tsafendas—that he was deeply political from an earlyage. After the assassination, Tsafendas volunteered a series of incontestable political reasons for killing Verwoerd, but these, along with details of his political past, were never allowed to see the light of day. This book reveals the extent of the cover-up by South Africa’s authorities and the desperate lengths they went to conceal the existence of Tsafendas’s opposition to apartheid.
Edmund de Waal is a world-famous ceramicist. Having spent thirty years making beautiful pots―which are then sold, collected, and handed on―he has a particular sense of the secret lives of objects. When he inherited a collection of 264 tiny Japanese wood and ivory carvings, called netsuke, he wanted to know who had touched and held them, and how the collection had managed to survive.
And so begins this extraordinarily moving memoir and detective story as de Waal discovers both the story of the netsuke and of his family, the Ephrussis, over five generations. A nineteenth-century banking dynasty in Paris and Vienna, the Ephrussis were as rich and respected as the Rothchilds. Yet by the end of the World War II, when the netsuke were hidden from the Nazis in Vienna, this collection of very small carvings was all that remained of their vast empire.
Lady Anne is one of Antjie’s Krog most acclaimed poetry collections. It was released in 1989, in Afrikaans, in the last tumultuous decade of apartheid, and received the Hertzog Prize in 1990
Newly cast in English, the collection transforms into a document of multiple voices, highlighting the complexity of a colonial legacy – still relevant 26 years later.
The critics say:
Stephen Clingman: “There is a rugged, gripping quality to Krog’s language, digging deep into the nature of South African life and her own self-challenging life
to it.”
Ingrid de Kok: “Krog engages . .. with originality and power, in poetic language of great beauty, passion and complexity.”
Kerry says: ‘’It is a rich dish, and you can only take so much at each sitting. And delicious.’’
Historian Ferguson (The Ascent of Money) examines several turns in the ever-shifting relationship between entrenched hierarchies and upstart “networks”: the 15th-century invention of the printing press enabled Protestants to challenge the Catholic Church and Enlightenment intellectuals and revolutionaries to overthrow monarchies; the advent of railroads, telegraphs, and radio allowed some bureaucratic states to become totalitarian dictatorships in the 20th century; the rise of the internet undermined hierarchical corporate and government control while empowering network monopolies such as Facebook. Ferguson’s episodic narrative explores these themes through vivid profiles of influential networks, from the 18th-century Illuminati (far more feckless than their conspiratorial reputation suggests) to the Rothschild banking empire, Cambridge University’s Apostles circle (an incubator of avant-garde literature, gay sex, and espionage), and Wikileaks. Twitter and Trump, ISIS and Facebook. Mostly short, easily digestible chapters.
This extraordinary account of imprisonment shows with exacting clarity the awful injustices of the system. Sylvia Neame, activist against apartheid and racism and by profession a historian (see the three-volume, The Congress Movement, HSRC Press, 2015), has not written a classical historical memoir. Rather, this book is a highly personal account, written in an original style. At the same time, it casts a particularly sharp light on the unfolding of a policedominated apartheid system in the 1960s. The author incorporates some of her experiences in prisons and police stations around the country, including the fabricated trial she faced while imprisoned in Port Elizabeth, one of the many such trials which took place in the Eastern Cape. But her focus is on Barberton Prison. Here she was imprisoned together with a small number of other white women political prisoners, most of whom had stood trial and been sentenced in Johannesburg in 1964-5 for membership to an illegal organisation, the Communist Party. It is a little known story. Not even the progressive party MP Helen Suzman found her way here. Barberton Prison, a maximum security prison, part of a farm jail complex in the eastern part of what was then known as the Transvaal province, was far from any urban centre. The women were kept in a small space at one end of the prison in extreme isolation under a regime of what can only be called psychological warfare, carried out on the instructions of the ever more powerful (and corrupt) security apparatus. A key concern for the author was the mental and psychological symptoms which emerged in herself and her fellow prisoners and the steps they took to maintain their sanity. It is a narrative partly based on diary entries, written in a minute hand on tissue paper, which escaped the eye of the authorities. Moreover, following her release in April 1967 - she had been altogether incarcerated for some three years - she produced a full script in the space of two or three months. The result is immediacy, spontaneity, authenticity; a story full of searing detail. It is also full of a fighting spirit, pervaded by a sharp intellect, a capacity for fine observation and a sense of humour typical of the women political prisoners at Barberton. A crucial theme in Sylvia Neame's account is the question of whether something positive emerged out of her experience and, if so, what exactly it was.
"Why are you learning Zulu?" When Mark Sanders began studying the language, he was often asked this question. In Learning Zulu, Sanders places his own endeavors within a wider context to uncover how, in the past 150 years of South African history, Zulu became a battleground for issues of property, possession, and deprivation. Sanders combines elements of analysis and memoir to explore a complex cultural history.
Perceiving that colonial learners of Zulu saw themselves as repairing harm done to Africans by Europeans, Sanders reveals deeper motives at work in the development of Zulu-language learning—from the emergence of the pidgin Fanagalo among missionaries and traders in the nineteenth century to widespread efforts, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, to teach a correct form of Zulu. Sanders looks at the white appropriation of Zulu language, music, and dance in South African culture, and at the association of Zulu with a martial masculinity. In exploring how Zulu has come to represent what is most properly and powerfully African, Sanders examines differences in English- and Zulu-language press coverage of an important trial, as well as the role of linguistic purism in xenophobic violence in South Africa.
Through one person's efforts to learn the Zulu language, Learning Zulu explores how a language's history and politics influence all individuals in a multilingual society.
Mark Sanders is professor of comparative literature at New York University. His books include Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid and Ambiguities of Witnessing: Law and Literature in the Time of a Truth Commission.
The death of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela on 2 April this year unleashed a hailstorm of opinion. On one side, Winnie’s legacy was under construction by the media and public in the shadow of her sanctified ex-husband, casting Winnie as history’s loser. Msimang – who in the last few years has reflected extensively on Winnie Madikizela-Mandela – stood on the side of a younger generation, particularly of black women, who sought to reclaim Ma Winnie’s identity as an extraordinary woman and fierce political activist.
Examining that early impulse, Msimang has written a succinct, razor-sharp book. It is a primer for young feminists, popular culture enthusiasts and those interested in the politics of memory, reconciliation and justice, and a book that is as much about a woman as it is about the country she left behind.
The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela is an astute examination of one of South Africa’s most controversial political figures. It charts the rise and fall – and rise, again – of a woman who not only battled the apartheid regime, but the patriarchal character of the society that moulded her. In telling Ma Winnie’s story, Sisonke Msimang demonstrates the vital link between reclaiming the lives of one complex woman, and activism aimed at restoring the dignity of all women.
About the author:
Sisonke Msimang divides her time between Perth, Australia, where she is head of oral storytelling at the Centre for Stories, and South Africa, where she continues to play an active role in public commentary and analysis. Msimang’s first book, Always Another Country, was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Alan Paton Award for 2018
As accomplished as its subject, redoubtable socialite and women’s suffrage crusader Alva Vanderbilt Belmont, Fowler’s engrossing successor to 2013’s Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald, again showcases her genius for seeing beyond the myths of iconic women. In 1874, 21-year-old Alva Smith and her three sisters have impeccable antecedents but no money. Marrying well being the only way to keep her family secure, Alva sets her sights on railroad scion William K. Vanderbilt. Her effort pays off—William inherits $65 million in 1885—though she finds neither love nor sexual pleasure with her amiable, self-absorbed husband. Wealth offers scope for Alva’s formidable leadership skills: in the same years she bears three children, wins the parvenu Vanderbilts a position in elite society, and collaborates with architect Richard Hunt on a series of influential projects. Impeccably virtuous and self-disciplined, Alva nevertheless faces frequent censure for her lack of feminine deference, particularly when, in her 40s, she refuses to ignore her husband’s infidelity. Instead, she negotiates a divorce, weathers the scandal, and finds new fulfillment. The novel doesn’t sentimentalize its subject’s unsympathetic moments and qualities, and Fowler puts Alva in a clear context, revealing the narrow constraints of her era, class, and gender, and the fierce courage and creativity with which she negotiated them. Though the novel’s lavish sweep and gorgeous details evoke a vanished world, Fowler’s exploration of the way powerful women are simultaneously devalued and rewarded resonates powerfully.
Early in The Consolation of Maps, Thomas Bourke’s austere and elusive debut novel, the trio of central characters gathers in a late-1980s Manhattan gallery, which is being prepared for a glittering exhibition. Kenji is Japanese and has recently been headhunted from his curatorial position in Tokyo to work for Theodora Appel. She is a leader in the somewhat obscure world of cartographic trading, where rare maps can change hands for a fortune. She is also something of a mystery, by turns ruthless and empathetic; and reliant on Maria, her loyal Italian colleague and friend.
Standing in the unfinished gallery space off Madison Avenue, these three discuss the nature of time and space. Kenji has been giving the builders a hand, and is streaked with gypsum and sweat – unpleasant in such a fastidious individual. Just at this moment, however, his physical dishevelment is the least of his worries because his employer has been making remarks that Kenji does not quite like – and he is desperate to hold the line… (The Irish Times)
Twenty-four years ago Katharina Haugen went missing. All she left behind was her husband Martin and a mysterious string of numbers scribbled on a piece of paper.
Every year on 9 October Chief Inspector William Wisting takes out the files to the case he was never able to solve. Stares at the code he was never able to crack. And visits the husband he was never able to help. But now Martin Haugen is missing too.
As Wisting prepares to investigate another missing person's case he's visited by a detective from Oslo. Adrian Stiller is convinced Martin's involved in another disappearance of a young woman and asks Wisting to close the net around Martin. But is Wisting playing cat and mouse with a dangerous killer or a grief-stricken husband who cannot lay the past to rest?
Eight-year-old Alabed delivers a gripping first-hand account of the war in Syria, which began when she was three and led to her creating the now-famous Twitter account that brought her story to the world. This memoir, written with the help of her mother, Fatemah, provides striking detail and a plea for the world’s help. Alabed describes how her family’s peaceful life in Aleppo was shattered when her father was taken by the secret police when she was three years old, relaying her family’s confusion and fear with clarity. The writer also recalls being worried about losing her Barbie boots, and the guilt she felt over that worry. Alabed moves easily between normal moments, such as watching cartoons with her brother and sharing a tomato with her family during the siege, and shocking ones, such as hearing her first bomb explosion and coming to recognize the sound of different munitions. Fatemah’s voice also enters the book at a few points, to worry aloud about the future for her country and her daughter. Alabed’s book is remarkable for the clarity of her voice, given her age and harrowing experiences, which culminated in the family’s 2016 escape to Turkey. The story she shares can sometimes be hard to read, but it gives a valuable perspective on war that Americans don’t often see
