I’ve been meaning to write this post for nearly a month, on books perfect for that weird zone between Christmas and New Year, when time stretches and hazes and the brain is equally fritzy. For those lucky enough to be on holiday over this period, here are some easy and entertaining reads. You may have noticed something about these Festive Booky Posts: with one exception so far (and there were SA connections in that case), all have featured local books. This is (as I’ve said before) not because South African writing and writers need any special pleading; but our publishers can’t even begin to compete with the marketing departments of big international outfits. Yet we have every kind of reading material to tickle your fancy, including in the commercial genres: so whether it’s historical fiction or romance or thrillers or police procedurals, we’ve got it all. To make this even more fun, while today’s post features beach and/or sofa reads by local authors and set in localities many will recognise, they’re also all by women authors. Then I decided to make a rule that all those featured had to have written two or more books in the chosen genre, because of that feeling of reading the last word of a really entertaining book and looking around hopefully for more of the same. So here you go.

First, 2019 saw the near simultaneous publication, by newly established Karavan Press, of Melissa Volker’s first two novels — Shadow Flicker and A Fractured Land. What a breath of fresh air: billed as eco-romances, they’re also pretty gripping thrillers. Shadow Flicker deals with wind turbines and A Fractured Land with fracking in the Karoo, but neither book is remotely preachy, nor do they bog down in technical details. The green issues are used simply to get the plots rolling downhill, gently at first, then at increasing speed. Brilliant concept, if you think about it: the tension is set up right from the get-go, and is highly relatable. As are the characters — human, wrestling with demons we all recognise (debt, anxiety, family strife) — and a few of them turn out to be psycho murderers, too. Let’s not forget the romance, either: good quotient of hunky (but flawed) heroes and love triangles. I haven’t seen anything like Volker’s novels elsewhere, and highly recommend them: she’s interesting about everything, whether it’s live music or surfing. Never a dull moment. The books also have beautiful covers, designed by Megan Ross.

Then, for Marian Keyes and Jojo Moyes fans, on to Qarnita Loxton’s Being series: Being Kari, Being Lily and the recently released Being Shelley. I’ve only read the first one, but I thoroughly enjoyed it, and it had what I especially like in this category of fiction: fun, even fluff, but with a good, chewy centre with some crunch to it. Being Kari deals with a Muslim woman who marries “out” and moves to a conventional and mostly white suburb on Cape Town’s coast — and then has to go home again because of a death in the family. The navigating of two worlds, the issues of identity and belonging give this highly readable romance some heft. Kari/Karima is part of a tight group of friends responsible for much of the novel’s fun (all the sex and shopping jokes), and the next two in the series deal with others in this group, so I’m really looking forward to meeting the gang again. Yet they’re all stand-alone novels. Oh, and the covers are gorgeous and suitably festive.

For real, proper grown-up “chick-lit” (what I prefer to call “domestic drama”), that will suck you in like a vacuum-cleaner, read Gail Schimmel’s The Park and The Accident. Be warned; although they’re not thrillers, both books had me reading until 2am. Once again, super-entertaining. Both involve moral and legal dilemmas that will have you wondering “What if that was me?” I also like Schimmel’s dry sense of humour and lean writing — not a word wasted.

Hawa, gorgeous as always. Picture found on the Liberian Observer site, no photographer credited.

Although Liberian H. J. Golakai isn’t strictly speaking a South African writer, she lived here long enough for me to claim her (I hope she doesn’t mind), and her crime novels featuring reporter Vee Johnson, The Lazarus Effect and The Score, are set in Cape Town and Oudtshoorn. An immunologist, she’s a superb writer, with my absolute favourite her non-fiction essay “Fugee”, but for holiday reading, I recommend her novels, recently reissued by Cassava Republic Press. She doesn’t shy away from the tough stuff, but falls firmly into the “let me escape for three hours” category of reads.

So everything I’ve recommended so far has some crunch; the issues are thought-provoking, even if the treatments are effortlessly smooth and highly digestible. But your brain is utterly fried, you never want to see your rellies again, and there will be murder if you have to resurrect that turkey carcass, then you need pure candyfloss. In which case, try Fiona Snyckers’s two e-book series: the H mysteries, featuring PI Eulalie Park, and the Cat’s Paw Cosy Mystery series (I just checked and the first in both is free!)

Snyckers is a local writer, but in this case, the two series are set on imaginary islands; one a semi-tropical one in the Indian Ocean; the other off the coast of Cornwall. The H books have a bit more weight (I loved the kick-ass, slightly fey heroine and her unusual love interest, as well as the location and all the FOOD), but the Cat’s Paw books feature kittens, so I am completely biased in their favour, and probably shouldn’t be trusted. But if, like me, you like a well-oiled plot and go all squiffy-eyed at cats in starring roles, get out your e-readers NOW. Six in each series, so that should get you safely past New Year.

The Cat’s Paw series does exist in print as well, but in this case, e-versions are probably the way to go.

Festive quotient for all of the above: off the charts. Romance, interesting settings, humour, and some interesting ideas on how to bump off one’s relatives. Or understand them better.

More Twelve Booky Days posts for the holidays. I tell this story every year at this time, as it encompasses nearly all my favourite things: books, writers, the kindness of strangers, the sort of miraculous coincidence that would never be plausible in fiction. Also a cracking good Christmas story.

A few years ago, I spent six weeks in a tiny village on Penobscot Bay in Maine, where the local library became a favourite haunt (it was everything a good library should be). Here I read my way steadily through Lee Child’s Jack Reacher ouvre. Not my usual fare, but I was keeping my grieving friend Karina company. After the death of her husband, she had turned to Lee Child’s thrillers for escape. But her first Christmas as a widow was approaching, and she was all out of Reacher books to read. Meanwhile, a Cambridge academic and surfer, Andy Martin, was about to publish a book on Lee Child’s writing process. I forgive Twitter everything because it somehow enabled Andy and Karina to connect online. They didn’t know each other; but when I offered to buy her a copy of his book (not available in South Africa), he said he was in the States, and he’d send a signed copy for me to mule back to her.

Here’s the amazing story of how, at the little Post Office in Castine, Maine, where the employees acted as my own personal Santa storage depot, not one, but TWO gift books showed up: dedicated to Karina and me and signed not only by the author, but by Lee Child himself. And all kinds of things followed from that; Andy came out to the Open Book festival in Cape Town the following year, and we got to Skype chat with Lee himself.

Time keeps passing, Lee keeps writing (so does Andy, and so does his wife Heather Martin, currently working on Lee’s biography), and we check in on each other online. We have each other’s books by now (I particularly enjoyed Andy’s two books on surfing), and I feel a warm glow every time I see Reacher Said Nothing: Lee Child and the Making of Make Me on my shelf.

This year, Andy published another book, this time not on Lee’s writing process, but his readers. Called With Child, it’s an account of how a book is marketed and received (required reading for everyone who thinks writing a book means lolling about on couches or in coffee-shops with a laptop), and also a colourful parade of real characters, with stories that are bizarre, hilarious and poignant. And there’s a chapter on Karina. It’s the most poignant of them all, even more so than the one about the man with terminal cancer and weeks to live, whose dying wish was to read the latest Jack Reacher novel, not yet released — and who had an advance copy sent to him in hospital.

I read the chapter on Karina first, but then I went back and read the entire book, utterly absorbed — it’s darkly funny, philosophy pops up at the most unexpected moments, and as a study of the work, responsibilities of and restrictions on a blockbuster writer, it’s fascinating. Highly recommended, and not just because I have a tiny walk-on part in it (as @Heckitty).

And then I read the Acknowledgements, with no small degree of disbelief. As my niece says, I can now retire: I have billing, in alphabetical order, with Tom Cruise. Oh, and Stephen King. And Karin Slaughter. See for yourself. *bows, accepts flowers, thanks family, manager, high-school English teacher, etcetera*

On the day before Christmas, I found this — the only Reacher book Karina doesn’t have — in a local charity shop. Yet another improbable, delightful coincidence.

Meta-read: Sally Andrew reads about the Lazy Lizard deli IN the Lazy Lizard deli in Prince Albert, from the third in the Tannie Maria mystery series. Karina Szczurek, supporting the home team, is inspired to try the Full Monty breakfast.

I recently had the good fortune to be invited to take part in the Prince Albert Leesfees, a delightful book fair in a small Karoo town at the foot of the magnificent Swartberg Range. It’s the back of beyond — a five-hour drive from Cape Town — but well worth the trip.

I drove up with my friend and fellow book-fiend Karina Szczurek, who was showcasing three books, fruits of her new venture, Karavan Press. I was going to read poems and talk about Wise About Waste: 150+ Ways to Help the Planet, my latest book. There was even more interest in the first in the series, 101 Water-wise Ways, and no wonder — the Karoo looked as if it had been scoured with a blow-torch. The drought is deadly serious, and PA residents are on rations of 90 litres per person per day. It was a relief to find all the grey water from my cottage went through a filter for re-use.

Karina and I plotted (in every sense of the word) all the way up the N1. Little did I know I was soon to be drawn into a different plot.

We settled into our borrowed digs for the weekend — a house and a cottage respectively, each cool and tranquil under the burning sun, beautifully but comfortably furnished, and our minds soon turned to the NB matter of What To Eat. Dinner that night was at the superb locavore establishment, The Real Food Company, but the one deli that kept popping up on all the recommended lists was The Lazy Lizard. Also, even my carefully egalitarian hosts gushed about their apple pie. Apple pie? Very nice, but not usually a dish that makes gourmets come over all messianic.

So the next morning, Karina was in search of a Real Brekfis, and she wanted to try the Lazy Lizard’s menu (word had gotten round). We arrived to find none other than Sally Andrew, author of the hugely popular and internationally renown Tannie Maria detective-and-recipe series, drinking coffee at one of the tables. She sprang to her feet to greet us. “I’m so glad to see you!” she cried. “May I read you a passage from my book?”

It turned out that a chapter in the third book in her series, Death on the Limpopo, is set in the Lazy Lizard itself. And we all wanted the gloriously surreal experience of being read to ABOUT the Lazy Lizard IN the Lazy Lizard. And it led to orders, too; Sally had barely gone a page when “The Full Monty” breakfast rolled up for Karina. But when Sally got to the apple pie, I simply had to find out what all the fuss was about, and ordered a piece. The most enormous wedge arrived. “I’ve being trying to get them to give me the recipe, so I can put it in a book,” said Sally. “But they won’t divulge. Please do some sleuthing and see if you can come up with the ingredients.”

The pie of pies.

So, for all Tannie Maria, baking and fruit pie fans, here’s my best effort. First, the pastry is definitely not shortcrust, but a moist flaky pastry with LOTS of butter, and confectioners’ sugar dusted on top. Then, the apples are baked French-style: they’re clearly sliced very thinly and raw when the pie goes in to bake, not pre-cooked. This means they’re as leaved and layered as the pastry, and are meltingly tender without being sloshy. I’d venture that they were Granny Smith apples — definitely not a red variety. Then golden raisins (but not too many); DEFINITELY lemon zest — a lot (and possibly some reconstituted candied peel as well); and finally, the most teasing of all: the spice mix. Cinnamon, obviously; but also a hint of clove and ginger — maybe allspice too? Plus more sugar and butter. That’s the best I can do, Tannie Maria, and if the Lazy Lizard chefs are now snickering up their sleeves, at least I gave it a shot. I now have to read Death on the Limpopo, if only for the happy memories, and also try my pie recipe to see if I can figure out quantities.

There’s a sweet coda to this sweet story: Karina is wearing the same rugby shirt her late husband, Andre Brink, wore when the Boks won the Rugby World Cup in 1995. Was this a teeny tiny factor in the Bok victory later that day? I like to think so. Also: book festivalling in a small town on the same weekend the national rugby team wins the World Cup is a very MERRY experience.

The fabled Prince Albert library quilt.

PS: Thanks to the organisers of the Leesfees — you did a wonderful job and we’re all longing to return.

One of the reasons Book Dash exists.

We're in the appropriately sunny Sunflower Library at Zonnebloem Primary on the edge of District Six in Cape Town, and it's exactly like stepping through the back of the wardrobe, except that this very South African Narnia is a completely happy place.

For me, taking part in a Book Dash day -- when groups of creative professionals get together to create free, open-access online and print books for children all around the world -- is worth a truckload of therapy and happy pills. The mission is simple: to put good books with local content into the hands of tens of thousands of small children, with the goal of every child owning a hundred books by the age of five. Does that sound impossible? Not if the Dashers have anything to do with it. Not only are the print books free, but you can download them onto a phone or tablet, translate them, print them and distribute them anywhere in the world.

How does it work? The rest of this blog will rely on pictures to convey the energy and yes, the magic.

Julia welcomes the teams: each consists of a writer, illustrator and designer. With the help of an editor and amazing logistical support, they create an entire book in one day.

It takes four generous and creative souls to make a good children's book. Here's Team Five putting together The Dream Pillow.

Make no mistake, this is serious work. Here's Team Eight, creating The Fish Who Couldn't Swim.

Everyone cares about what they're doing. Matthew and Ingrid ponder Grandpa Farouk's Garden.

"Quick! Catch that idea before it escapes!" Team Six pinning down You! Yes, you!

Writing runs on coffee. Harry doing a great job of keeping us fueled.

Something the support team always gets right: very superior snacks for all.

There's a lot of laughter: Mazi and Clyde joke around, and that's Alex chuckling in the background too.

It helps when the support team keeps smilling: here's Neo live-tweeting the event.

When you score one of the country's best children's book illustrators for a story you've wanted to write for EIGHTEEN YEARS. Alex Latimer busy drawing scenes that existed only in my head yesterday.

And the brilliant Jennifer Jacobs neatly and efficiently turning ideas and images into a Real Live Book. Meet Toast, everyone!

Photograph of Alexandra Fuller in Wyoming by Laure Joliet, The New York Times/Redux. No copyright infringement intended.

I met Alexandra (Bobo) Fuller for the first time at the Franschhoek Literary Festival in 2009. It was a blustery wet night back when winter still delivered plentiful rain. The fanfare accompanying her memoir of her Zimbabwean childhood, Don’t Let’s Go To The Dogs Tonight, preceded her everywhere. So I was star-struck, and even more so when overhearing someone ask her how her visit to Zambia had been – she’d just come from visiting family there: “My parents are fine, and there was a puffadder living under my bed.”

I had grown up with boomslangs in the attic. Common ground? I loitered closer. And then the kind of opportunity fans dream of presented itself: Fuller continued, in the carrying tones of those educated in anglophone boarding schools: “I’m having the most appalling period pains. I want to curl up and howl. Truly, I might be dying, and I’ve got this whole effing evening to get through.”

Hallelujah! In my handbag I carried extremely effective meds for this very purpose. I stepped forward and offered them. I gave her one to take immediately, washed down with the glass of red wine in her hand, another to swallow if no relief within 30 minutes, and a third for the next day. She gulped down the magic pill with profuse thanks and zero qualms about accepting drugs from a stranger, and then tides of people took her away. Half an hour later, there was a tug at my arm. “It’s a miracle! I feel human again.”

So after that bonding experience, there was affection and connection whenever our paths and years crossed. She came across an anthology on landscapes of Southern Africa (Lovely Beyond Any Singing) that I had compiled; living thousands of miles from her heart-home, it became a portal to Africa for her. Meanwhile, I gobbled up everything she wrote.

Don’t Let’s Go To The Dogs Tonight introduced readers to her piercing combination of honesty and generosity (“she looks back with rage and love,” said one reviewer), as well as a sometimes near-hallucinatory style. I found Scribbling The Cat, an account of her travels with a veteran of the “Rhodesian War” too intense and unguarded to bear, but her next book, The Legend of Colton H. Bryant, is a small masterpiece of biography. In it, she tells the true and haunting story of a young Wyoming roustabout who fell to his death from an oil rig because the drilling company had failed to install safety rails.

She told me she’d written her first three books because silence has never been an option for her: the first was an attempt to give voice to what had until then been unspoken, the second the unspeakable (“an impossible project”), and in the third, she tried to speak for the speechless dead.

It’s hard not to admire the honesty with which she writes of a dysfunctional (“operatic”) but loving home, of the struggles to locate herself within adopted, adored and ultimately alien countries. Her Africa memoirs culminate in Cocktail Hour Under The Tree of Forgetfulness, a loving account of her mother’s extraordinary, messy and bravura life. One of the most striking scenes involves Nicola Fuller, who insisted on flying lessons, singing “Fly Me To The Moon” under a swollen gold moon as she comes in to land on a patchy Zambian airfield. 

Relocating to Wyoming after marrying an American, Fuller forged ahead with writing the stories of yet another adopted home, and so came The Legend of Colton H. Bryant and Leaving Before the Rains Come. When she read from the former at the Cape Town launch at the Book Lounge, her audience held cans of Mountain Dew in one hand and tissues in the other.

Until I read her most recent work, her debut novel Quiet Until the Thaw, I found Leaving her most absorbing book: a memoir of the corrosive effects of unresolved trauma, displacement and financial disaster on two generations of family. But this is no kitchen-sink drama; the book charges towards a cliffhanger that would be improbable in fiction. Against the backdrop of their crumbling marriage, she fights like a tiger to save her husband’s life after a riding accident leaves him on the point of death. It’s clear that even if she made a lousy wife (she is brutally honest about her failings), she’s a very good person to have in your corner when things go wrong.

Now, after producing memoirs of a range of unforgettable people, ranging from her closest kin to a stranger, she has turned to fiction. She is in South Africa to attend Stellenbosch University’s Woordefees, a festival that celebrates and attracts a wide range of cultural and literary artists. This gave us the chance to spend an hour talking about the past, her new novel, and the life she has recrafted in Wyoming, where she now lives in a yurt: “Impermanence has become important”, she says.

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The thing about Alexandra Fuller is that if you ask her how she is, she will tell you. She is unflinchingly, almost unnervingly truthful. We pick up from our last conversation as if years, an ocean and two books haven’t intervened. She tells me of the shattering breakdown that followed the death of her father, to whom her novel is dedicated: of the family upheaval that followed, the self-medicating with alcohol, the flashbacks to childhood traumas, the struggle to come to terms with her parents’ failure to protect her from a predatory neighbour, which for her is wound up one of her lifelong tasks: comprehending and atoning for the complicity of her settler history and its embedding in colonial racism.

The connection might not seem obvious to the casual bystander, but it’s all about cycles of violence, she keeps telling me. They keep repeating, and so we have to understand how deep they run, the places they have their roots. Few people hold so squarely in their sights the mechanics of how patriarchal exploitation and abuse of women and children is tied into the structural violence of racism and colonialism, of the exploitation of the planet’s resources to the extent of making our only home uninhabitable, of genocides and the way military, political and cultural forces enact these, and then blame the victims for the host of ills that follow.

This brings us to her most recent work and first novel, Quiet Until The Thaw. Set on an Indian reservation (“The Rez”) of the Lakota Oglala Sioux Nation, in South Dakota, it tells the story of cousins who choose different paths in response to their experiences of being pushed to the barest margins of society in their own country. Written with deceptive simplicity, it engages with all the issues mentioned above, most especially the perennial problem of violence, and the only solution: to recognise the interconnectedness of all things and peoples, and thus to grasp that any violence we perpetrate will haunt, twist and scar us, and our children, and their children.

When giving testimony against the oil company on whose rig Colton H. Bryant died, she discovered that different procedures were followed when drilling on Indian land. She began to visit, to listen, joining in endurance rides where she was “invisible”. I tease her about rushing in again where angels fear to tread: a white woman, a double settler, trying to tell the story of another culture, another way of life. She acknowledges the enormity of this task, that she strove above all “for humility”. It shows in her writing.

I ask how it felt, making the jump from memoir to fiction – a stumbling block for many writers – and she laughs: “This is the most autobiographical thing I’ve ever written.”

This might seem strange, especially if one reads the blurb on the back cover, which repeats all the familiar tropes of a multi-generational Cain-and-Abel story, of “broedertwis”, giving the impression one has picked up a family saga with an extra dollop of liberal earnestness. Nothing could be further from the truth: the book has no epic thrust or sprawling narrative. Instead, it is a series of beautifully wrought vignettes, written in chapters of no more than 250 words at a time, with chapter headings that advance the story. These near-fragments are funny, searing, lyrical and wise.

“They’re all true,” she tells me. “Everything in that book, all the characters: they’re real – it’s all reportage. I just listened and stitched the pieces together.” She goes on to explain that the structure of the book is modelled on Indian storytelling, where one voice will speak, and another will chime in with a detail or the addition of a character or event, and then another; the story belongs to all. Even when creation myths are told, they are spoken quietly to sleeping children.

One of the pleasures of the book is Fuller’s trademark lyricism: “Snow around the tepee became like mashed sweet potatoes, then like kernels of corn, then granular sugar, and finally it melted completely and puddled up in the tufts of last year’s old grass.” Even the throwaway phrases – “tiny wrens with their big songs” – are polished to perfection.

This is not to say that Fuller doesn’t also recount the bad, the ugly, the bleak and the frankly hideous: she pulls no punches about life on an Indian reservation, and the ills that bloom like black mould in these contexts of despair and deprivation. She manages that rare trick: effective sarcasm, and although the book spans seven decades, from McCarthyism to Standing Rock, trenchant commentary on current events is never far away: for instance, she writes that the absence of incest taboos among white settler Americans eventually created “a class of chinless, insecure, wig-wearing golfers”.

The book distills a great deal of wisdom, but this extract showcases both the extreme pragmatism and idealism Fuller learned from the Lakota – the “much madness [that] is divinest sense”:

Even if we stopped everything right now, all the war and abuse and hurt and injury, and treated each other with nothing but love.

We’d still have generations to go before we settled into real peace, but it would be real peace.

The question isn’t “Why bother?”

It’s “Why not?”

Perhaps the answer is that most people don’t believe in themselves enough to imagine one or two or seven generations down the line, the way the Lakota are trained to think. Perhaps they refuse to entrust the possibility of peace to some as yet unborn descendants because their own ancestors no such respect for their possibility of peace. An eye for an eye in ever-increasing cycles of violence going all the way around to where this all ends, and all begins.

So when I ask her about recent events in Zimbabwe, her message remains the same: while she is encouraged, even overjoyed by the departure of two Southern African despots, Robert Mugabe and Jacob Zuma, her question is: will these changes, upheavals even, break what in a National Geographic interview she calls “the half-life of war”, the pattern of violence that haunts both countries?

We also speak about the water crisis afflicting Cape Town in particular, but with the drought so severe that three South African provinces have been declared national disaster zones. We speak about the myopia of the middle classes, the consumerist grasshoppers who go on devouring resources as if they were as limitless as our appetites for stuff, for profligacy, for waste. This numbness, the profound disconnection between we who live on the earth and our immediate surroundings, as if we are not interlinked and inter-dependent, is something she tackles head-on in Quiet Until The Thaw.

We return, finally, to the yurt that is now her home. I tell her that she has come full circle: that after a life of wandering, she is now a permanent itinerant. She yelps with laughter: “I hadn’t thought of it that way, but you’re right.”

I wish her the peace she deserves. And look forward to reading about her future inward and outward journeys.