Archive for the ‘International’ Category
by Amanda on Apr 17th, 2012
This month, Harvill Secker releases The White Shadow, a brand new novel by Andrea Eames, author of The Cry of the Go-Away Bird:
A young boy struggles to protect his mysterious and gifted younger sister in this suspenseful story set against the backdrop of the Zimbabwe War of Liberation.
Tinashe is a young Shona boy living in a small village in rural Rhodesia. The guerilla war of the late 1960s haunts the bushlands, but it only infrequently affects his quiet life; school, swimming in the river, playing with the other kids on the kopje. When his younger sister, Hazvinei, is born, Tinashe knows at once that there is something special about her. Their life in the village, once disturbed only by the occasional visits of his successful uncle and city cousin, Abel, now becomes entangled with the dual forces of the Shona spirit world and the political turmoil of the nation.
As Tinashe, Hazvinei and Abel grow older, their destinies entangle in ways they never expected. Tinashe is prepared to follow his sister anywhere – but how far can he go to keep her safe when the forces threatening her are so much darker and more sinister than he suspected?
Andrea Eames weaves together folklore and suspense in this compelling tale of a boy struggling to do the right thing in an unpredictable world.
About the author
Andrea Eames was born in 1985. She was brought up in Zimbabwe, where she attended a Jewish school for six years, a Hindu school for one, a Catholic convent school for two and a half, and then the American International School in Harare for two years. Andrea’s family moved to New Zealand in 2002. Andrea has worked as a bookseller and editor and now lives in Austin, Texas with her husband. Her first novel, The Cry of the Go-Away Bird, was published in 2011.
Book details
» read article
by Amanda on Apr 14th, 2011
In celebration of the publication of Imraan Coovadia‘s Green-Eyed Thieves in India by Seagull Books, we bring you an extract from what is, in South Africa, a fairly old publication. Green-Eyed Thieves, sold to Seagull Books in late 2009, forms part of the publisher’s “Africa List”, presented at the Cape Town Book Fair last year:
Finally we spent hours going from one private room to the next on the psychiatric floor hoping to escape from the same doctor who admitted us in the first place. Dr Böhrendorf wasn’t the happy man he had been in the morning. It’s sad for any decent psychiatrist when a textbook case fishes your medical degree off the wall of your office, and adds insult to injury by helping himself to your brown-bag lunch. I wouldn’t be surprised if that morning was the seed for a ferocious persecution mania on Böhrendorf ’s part. I waved to him through the window of the elevator as we descended into the basement. Ashraf found a handtruck and carted a file cabinet out of the emergency-room entrance and into the subway. No one followed us onto the train.
It was nice to be out of the city, and then to come back. On our way home from the Island Ashraf and I walked through the evening crowds on their back-and-forth ant marches. We speculated about people’s movements, asked about this one patrolling the corner of Fulton and Clinton, that one opening her bag to retrieve a cheque book, whistled at the beautiful, sharp-nosed girl in a peasant’s shawl descending the winding stairway to the C train, hassled the made-up guy who works at Stingy Lulus on Tompkins Square Park, joked with the rusted, reeling old man in a formal brown buttoned vest and tie who brought jars of brown liquor into the subway in a paper bag. The muscle men, the Circassians, memoirists, sidewalk notables, fry cooks, passing shoppers and shop owners were suddenly our New York brothers and sisters. We were on more intimate terms with our fellow New Yorkers now that we had a random sampling of their social-security numbers. All in all I was getting to like the city, even getting to be comfortable in Brooklyn. Although I can’t honestly say I liked it, I increasingly found Brooklyn to be neighbourly—if by that elastical term you comprehend the neighbourly feeling of the Serbs for the Bosnians and the neighbourly glow that lights thehearts of the Hutus when their thoughts turn to the Tutsis next door. People kept turning to stare at us as my brother tried to keep the file cabinet out of their way.
Book details
» read article
by Amanda on Mar 18th, 2011
Random House Struik is pleased to present The Cry of the Go-Away Bird by Andrea Eames.
Elise loves the farm that is her home; she loves playing with beetles and chameleons in the garden, buying sweets from the village shop and listening to the stories of spirits and charms told by her nanny, Beauty. As a young white girl in 1990s Zimbabwe, her life is idyllic. Her clothes are always clean and ironed, there is always tea in the silver teapot, gin and tonics are served on the veranda, and, in theory at least, black and white live in harmony.
However this dream-world of her childhood cannot last. As Elise gets older, her eyes are opened to the complexities of adult existence, both through the changes wrought in her family by the arrival of her step-father Steve, and through her growing understanding of the tensions in Zimbabwean society. As Mugabe’s presidency turns sour, the privileged world of the white farmers begins to crumble into anarchy.
The Cry of the Go-Away Bird follows Elise as she attempts to make sense of her place in the world while her family struggle to stay afloat in the collapsing economy and escalating horror that surrounds them. As the violence intensifies and the farm invasions begin, Elise and her family are forced to confront difficult choices and the ancient unforgiving ghosts of the past.
About the author
Andrea Eames was brought up in Zimbabwe, where she attended a Jewish school for six years, a Hindu school for one, a Catholic convent school for two and a half, and then the American International School in Harare for two years. Andrea’s family moved to New Zealand in 2002. Andrea has worked as a bookseller and editor and lives in Christchurch with her husband. The Cry of the Go-Away Bird is her first novel.
Book details
» read article
by Amanda on Feb 4th, 2011
Trevor Corbett, author of An Ordinary Day
, told the Sunday Times that “it is sometimes good for the soul to read books which go against popular opinion”.
That is why he is currently reading The Greatest Hoax on Earth? by Jonathan Sarfati. He finds the section on language particularly interesting:
I’m not really a mainstream fiction reader. At the moment I’m reading a fascinating rebuttal of The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution (Richard Dawkins), called The Greatest Hoax on Earth? by Dr Jonathan Sarfati.
It is not light-weight reading at all and Sarfati goes to great lengths to systematically knock down Dawkins’ theories using science, logic and rational arguments.
Book details
» read article
by Amanda on Aug 5th, 2010
A meditative but unsettling short work of remembrance by Henrietta Rose-Innes, published online in conjunction with Granta magazine’s “Going Back” issue:
Homecoming – II
The stones were heaped in the shed along with spiderwebs, an old saddle, an empty hatbox and other junk. Drifts of unpolished semiprecious gems: tiger’s eye, amethyst, agate, rose quartz. The pieces of rock ranged in size from sugar-lump to bread-loaf. They were dusty and opaque, but if you dipped them in water they revealed secret, translucent colours. One of the ongoing ritual tasks of our childhood was the sorting of the stones, making piles of green and purple and copper-brown. It was my father’s idea: he held on to the hope that the stones might be valuable, although he never found a buyer.
My parents had moved into the dilapidated Victorian house in our modest suburb of Cape Town in 1969, two years before my birth. Later, I heard the stories of how it was: the house dilapidated, the garden a jungle. There were children’s scribbles on the walls, my sister told me, names written close to the floor.
Book details
» read article
by Amanda on Jul 19th, 2010
The Sunday Times’ most sharp-tongued writer was not feeling terribly well-disposed toward author Alec Russell at the beginning of their interview; but things took a turn for the better as soon as they started to chat:
I wanted to be horrible to Alec Russell. For one thing, he was late. Secondly, I’m not really over the moon about foreigners writing so authoritatively about South Africa. Thirdly, well, it was sort of Monday; Tuesday, in fact, and too early to talk.
But he turned out to be charming, with kind blue eyes, polite and self-deprecating in a manner that didn’t indicate underlying arrogance. He sits with the sun blazing into his eyes, blinding him completely. “I tell you what I might do,” he suggests tentatively, “I might just move to another seat, would you mind? If I were to move over there, is that okay? Are you okay where you are?”
He was so nice in fact that I wondered how he had ever managed to be a journalist. When I said things like, “Well, I think you were a bit hard on Mbeki,” he looks crestfallen and says, in that English stuttery way, “Oh, do you think so, oh dear, I do think you’re right, how awful. I should have another look at that.”
He was so nice in fact that I wondered how he had ever managed to be a journalist. When I said things like, “Well, I think you were a bit hard on Mbeki,” he looks crestfallen and says, in that English stuttery way, “Oh, do you think so, oh dear, I do think you’re right, how awful. I should have another look at that.”
Book details
» read article
by Amanda on Jul 14th, 2010
As Nelson Mandela approaches his ninety-second birthday, a new edition of Alec Russell’s acclaimed book on the trajectory that Mandela’s party – and country – is taking:
When Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress declared victory over the bitter injustice of apartheid, some thought South Africa’s future was assured. But despite Mandela’s mission of reconciliation, rampant inequality remains; race relations are uneasy, violence is endemic and many in the ANC appear to have lost sight of the liberation ideals. With the election in 2009 of Jacob Zuma, a charismatic populist embroiled in scandal, uncertainty over the trajectory of the nation has only intensified.
South Africa now stands at a crossroads, and award-winning journalist Alec Russell draws on his deep knowledge of the country to tell us how it got there and to give us a compelling account, revised and updated for this edition, of the journey from Mandela to Zuma.
“A brisk, lively and vividly written portrait of post-apartheid South Africa.”
- Peter Godwin, author of Mukiwa
Book details
» read article
by Amanda on Jul 5th, 2010
JM Coetzee’s Summertime is shortlisted for this year’s Sunday Times Fiction Prize. It tells the story of Vincent, a literary biographer who is working on a book about the recently deceased author John Coetzee. In this excerpt, Vincent interviews Sophie Denoel, a former colleague of Coetzee’s at the University of Cape Town:
Well, I am certainly grateful to you. But, Mme Denoël, let me make one further appeal. Coetzee was never a popular writer. By that I do not simply mean that his books did not sell well. I also mean that the public never took him to their collective heart. There was an image of him in the public realm as a cold and supercilious intellectual, an image he did nothing to dispel. Indeed one might even say he encouraged it.
Now I don’t believe that image does him justice. The conversations I have had with people who knew him well reveal a very different person – not necessarily a warmer person, but someone more certain of himself, more confused, more human, if I can use that word.
Book details
» read article
by Amanda on May 20th, 2010
It gives Random House Struik great pleasure to announce that JM Coetzee is the recipient of Australia’s 2010 Christina Stead Prize for Fiction for his autobiographical novel, Summertime. The announcement of this prestigious award was made on Monday, 17 May by New South Wales Premier, Kristina Keneally. The prize comes with a AUS40 000 purse.
The Christina Stead Prize for Fiction is named in honour of the highly acclaimed Australian novelist and short-story writer. The prize may be awarded for either a novel or a collection of stories.
In Summertime, a rich, funny, and deeply affecting autobiographical novel, a young English biographer is working on a book about the late writer, John Coetzee. He plans to focus on the years from 1972–1977 when Coetzee, in his thirties, is sharing a run-down cottage in the suburbs of Cape Town with his widowed father. This, the biographer senses, is the period when he was “finding his feet as a writer”.
Never having met Coetzee, he embarks on a series of interviews with people who were important to him – a married woman with whom he had an affair, his favourite cousin Margot, a Brazilian dancer whose daughter had English lessons with him, former friends and colleagues. From their testimony emerges a portrait of the young Coetzee as an awkward, bookish individual with little talent for opening himself to others.
Sometimes heartbreaking, often very funny, Summertime shows us a great writer as he limbers up for his task. It completes the majestic trilogy of fictionalised memoir begun with Boyhood and Youth.
JM Coetzee’s works include Waiting For the Barbarians, Life & Times of Michael K, Boyhood, Youth, Disgrace, and Diary of a Bad Year. He was the first author to win the Booker Prize twice and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003.
Book details
» read article
