South African Literature

Khian "Khi" Prince has the ladies going crazy. He's a certified boss with what seems to be the weight of the world on his shoulders. After failing at love twice, Khi's not ready to give up yet, and when he runs into Cuba Lance, he's certain he has finally gotten it right. But when Cuba shatters his heart all over again, will Khi give up on love once and for all? Daelan "Dae" Prince is the ultimate bad boy. With the love of his life and their five-year-old son by his side, Dae seems to have his happily ever after. But things are never what they seem.

The summer of 1936 in Parsons, Georgia, is unseasonably hot, and Opal Pruitt senses a nameless storm brewing. She hopes this foreboding feeling won’t overshadow her upcoming 18th birthday or the annual Founder’s Day celebration in just a few weeks. She and her Grandma Birdie work as housekeepers for the white widow Miss Peggy, and Opal desperately wants some time to be young and carefree with her cousins and friends.

Since childhood, identical twins Leona and Fiona Dunbar have been getting in—and out—of trouble by pretending to be each other. Yet underneath, they couldn’t be more different. Outspoken Leona lives to break rules, have a good time, and scandalize their respectable hometown of Lexington. Fiona is a seemingly demure churchgoing girl who is the apple of her domineering, widowed mother Mavis’s eye. But together, the twins have fooled teachers, boyfriends, bosses, racist police—and most importantly, straitlaced Mavis.

In Jason Mott’s Hell of a Book, a Black author sets out on a cross-country publicity tour to promote his bestselling novel. That storyline drives Hell of a Book and is the scaffolding of something much larger and more urgent: Mott’s novel also tells the story of Soot, a young Black boy living in a rural town in the recent past, and The Kid, a possibly imaginary child who appears to the author on his tour.

Award-winning author Wanda Morris returns with a powerful, haunting thriller following a lawyer who after the mysterious disappearance of a local landowner and the death of his sister just months before, uncovers a conspiracy that dates back to Reconstruction and persists in half the United States today.

It is 2003 – ten years since Spud Milton’s class of 93 matriculated and the boys went their separate ways. Despite their seemingly unbreakable bond, the Crazy Eight – Rambo, Mad Dog, Vern, Fatty, Garth Garlic, Boggo, Simon and Spud – have not kept in touch. Or at least, not as far as Spud knows. When he receives an invitation from the school to attend the ten-year reunion weekend, Spud is determined to avoid the event at all costs, but he hasn’t reckoned with the bombardment of intrusive messages and threatening phone calls from his former dorm mates.

Young Adam, who has been raised in Harlem by his white father, George, and Black mother, Thelma, goes back to his parents' home state of Alabama to participate in the voting rights campaign, only to be brutalized in the Bloody Sunday melee. He is still recovering from this when he is struck a heavy emotional blow, learning for the first time—and in the cruelest way imaginable—of a family secret that sends him spiraling and plunging further into danger. To save him, and any hope for their relationship, Thelma is drawn back, for the first time in twenty years, to the South.

Corinne LaMer defeated the wicked jumbie Severine months ago, but things haven't exactly gone back to normal in her Caribbean island home. Everyone knows Corinne is half-jumbie, and many of her neighbors treat her with mistrust. When local children begin to go missing, snatched from the beach and vanishing into wells, suspicious eyes turn to Corinne. To rescue the missing children and clear her own name, Corinne goes deep into the ocean to find Mama D'Leau, the dangerous jumbie who rules the sea.

Born in a South Africa divided by racism and hatred, this one small boy will come to lead all the tribes of Africa. Through enduring friendships with Hymie and Gideon, Peekay gains the strength he needs to win out. And in a final conflict with his childhood enemy, the Judge, Peekay will fight to the death for justice.

Born in what’s now called Zimbabwe, journalist Peter Godwin returns to his homeland in 2008 after three decades of Robert Mugabe’s brutal economic and human destruction. Hoping to “dance on Mugabe’s political grave” in the wake of the tyrant’s defeat at the polls, Godwin instead risks his life to secretly chronicle Mugabe’s ruthless backlash of torture and terror locals call “The Fear.”

Stacey is the dusty air, the cracked soil, the drought. To thirteen-year-old Bethany Sloane, she’s everything. Abandoned by her mother at a remote African boarding school, Bethany will do anything to stay in Stacey’s good graces. And that means learning the rules of each twisted game.

When summoned to Georgetown, South Carolina, sisters Mariah Clark and Sabrina Holland both assume their ailing grandfather's health has gotten worse. Neither expects their grandmother's undeniable request—save the family restaurant. Mariah is at a crossroad in her life. After being dumped by her husband and forced to walk away from their diner that she helped rescue from bankruptcy, bitter feelings consume her. Even though the restaurant has been in the family for eighty-six years, giving her all to another struggling business isn't something she wants to do.

It’s a hot and sticky Sunday in Lafayette, Louisiana, and Glory has settled into her usual after-church routine, meeting gamblers at the local coffee shop, where she works as a small-time bookie. Sitting at her corner table, Glory hears that her best friend—a nun beloved by the community—has been found dead in her apartment. When the police declare the mysterious death a suicide, Glory is convinced that there must be more to the story and, with her reluctant daughter in tow, launches a shadow investigation in a town of oil tycoons, church gossips, and a rumored voodoo priestess.

Casey Black needs an escape. When her picture-perfect vow renewal ceremony ends in her being left at the altar, the former model turned social media influencer has new fame--the kind she never wanted. An embarrassing viral video has cost her millions of followers, and her seven-year marriage is over. With her personal and business lives in shambles, Casey runs from New York City to South Carolina's Lowcountry hoping to find long-lost family. Family who can give her more answers about her past than her controlling mom-slash-manager has ever been willing to share.

Following on from his bestselling novels A Year in the Wild and Back to the Bush, James Hendry returns to the setting of Sasekile Private Game Reserve for another tale that takes the listener behind the scenes with the MacNaughton brothers, Angus and Hugh. It is four and a half years since Angus’s last year in the wild when he was newly appointed to the position of head ranger at Sasekile. Much has happened in the interim.

So begins award-winning poet DéLana R. A. Dameron’s debut novel, Redwood Court. The baby of the family, Mika Tabor spends much of her time in the care of loved ones, listening to their stories and witnessing their struggles. On Redwood Court, the cul-de-sac in the all-Black working-class suburb of Columbia, South Carolina, where her grandparents live, Mika learns important lessons from the people who raise her.

When Ann Waite discovers a shipwreck in Algoa Bay she is stunned to find survivors: a scarred sailor and a little boy. As the man walks away into the distance alone, Ann is left to raise the young child, Harry, in place of the baby she tragically lost at sea. Disaster and hardship befall Ann and Harry, and desperation drives them into the path of the mysterious shipwrecked man once more. Ralph Courtney has recently escaped Robben Island with two fellow prisoners and is destined to seek his fortune at Nativity Bay, the fabled place about which his father told him stories.

With the same unforgettable and distinctive prose on display in his other books, Airtight Willie & Me is further evidence that Iceberg Slim was an expert at capturing the language of the streets. Always compelling, sometimes funny, and often bleak, Slim gives us six slices of city life that will leave you thirsting for more.

Carl Weber brings the best of urban street lit authors together, all telling their own dramatic tales of life in the streets in known cities across the USA. The second installment continues with Treasure Hernandez telling the tale of the Dirty South.

For years, it was called a "deteriorating situation." Now it is war. All over South Africa, mobs of fugitive white people scramble to board departing flights. But Bam and Maureen Smales have no such option. They take up their servant July's suggestion and seek refuge in his remote home village, forever altering the relationship of servant and master. Now it is the Smales who are dependent on their host, their savior - their keeper. Nadine Gordimer is the winner of the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature.