Poppie Nongena's arduous journey covers 40 years of South Africa's history, sweeping through the riots of Sharpeville, Soweto and Cape Town, on to an indefinite but unpromising future. The plot reflects the brutality and injustice of the Apartheid system, while Elsa Joubert's characterisations reflects the courage and fortitude of people in the face of hardship and difficulty.Poppie's contented childhood in the Cape's countryside came to an end when she married a migrant worker, an...

At a prayer meeting on a cold Rotterdam night, the young clerk Aart Anthonij van der Lingen - a pale, sickly, hunchbacked 'fish from the North' - is held in the charismatic Reverend Johannes Kicherer's thrall. Lured by Kicherer's passion, he leaves his grey and loveless life to land at the Cape of Good Hope as a lay missionary in 1800. But when the Missionary Society draws lots to determine where to send the new arrivals, Van der Lingen is sent east and Kicherer north. The hunchback missio...

Voted one of the hundred most important books published in Africa during the last century. Winner of the WA Hofmeyr Prize, the CNA Literary Award and the Louis Luyt Prize.Sharing the language and religion or the Afrikaners bent on her people's subjugation, Poppie Nongena - a Xhosa woman born in an Upington township - has no choice but to negotiate the riptide of structural violence that is apartheid South Africa. Rootless, her ailing husband emasculated by legislation and her children bear...

Celebrated author Elsa Joubert has been a traveller to foreign places all her life. With this memoir, completed in her 95th year, she explores the continent of old age. It is a searing, honest account of ageing, as she settles into a cosmopolitan Cape Town retirement home along with the Englishman across the passage, her Dutch friend Jo Struik, and the support of StomJapie. It also tells of the force of returning memories; of her sister's early death, rivalry with her brother, family holid...

The classic memoir of Africa, aviation, and adventure—the inspiration for Paula McLain's Circling the Sun and "a bloody wonderful book" (Ernest Hemingway).A New York Times BestsellerBeryl Markham's life story is a true epic. Not only did she set records and break barriers as a pilot, she shattered societal expectations, threw herself into torrid love a...

James A. Michener’s masterly chronicle of South Africa is an epic tale of adventurers, scoundrels, and ministers, the best and worst of two continents who carve an empire out of a vast wilderness. From the Java-born Van Doorn family tree springs two great branches: one nurtures lush vineyards, the other settles the interior to become the first Trekboers and Afrikaners. The Nxumalos, inhabitants of a peaceful village unchanged for centuries, unite warrior tribes into the powerful Zulu natio...

Coward, scoundrel, lover and cheat, but there is no better man to go into the jungle with. Join Flashman in his adventures as he survives fearful ordeals and outlandish perils across the four corners of the world.When our hero Flashman accepts an invitation from his old enemy, Tom Brown of Rugby, to join in a friendly cricket match, he does not suspect that he is letting himself in for the most desperate game of his scandalous career.What follows is a deadly struggle that s...

1930-something: a professional hunter is passing through an unnamed Central European country that is in the thrall of a vicious dictator. The hunter wonders whether he can penetrate undetected into the dictator’s private compound. He does. He has the potential target in his sites and is wondering whether to pull the trigger when security catches up with him. Imprisoned, tortured, doomed to a painful death, the hunter makes an extraordinary and harrowing escape, fleeing through enemy territ...

Ezeulu, headstrong chief priest of the god Ulu, is worshipped by the six villages of Umuaro. But he is beginning to find his authority increasingly under threat - from his rivals in the tribe, from those in the white government and even from his own family. Yet he still feels he must be untouchable - surely he is an arrow in the bow of his God? Armed with this belief, he is prepared to lead his people, even if it means destruction and annihilation. Yet the people will not be so easily domi...

Prester John is an adventure novel by John Buchan. It tells the story of a young Scotsman named David Crawfurd and his adventures in South Africa, where a Zulu uprising is tied to the medieval legend of Prester John. Crawfurd is similar in many ways to Buchan's later character, Richard Hannay.The legends of Prester John were popular in Europe from the 12th through the 17th centuries, and told of a Christian patriarch and king said to rule over a Christian nation lost amidst the Mus...

Frederick Courteney Selous (1851-1917) was a British explorer, hunter and conservationist, and is most remembered for his activities in Southeast Africa. Selous explored lesser-known areas, where he recorded ethnographic notes and collected specimens. ‘Big Game Shooting’, published in 1894, is an anecdotal account that chronicles his experiences of hunting the lion in South Africa, and offers a personal insight into late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century game hunting practices. It wo...