We Recommend: Wolf Hall

"It's a story (...) about power."
"Though set in Henry's court and, overwhelmingly, about his long, panting battle to divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn, Wolf Hall is really the story of Thomas Cromwell, the blacksmith's boy who became the king's right-hand man. When we first meet Thomas, he is sprawled on the floor, bloody and beaten. His father, drunken Walter, has just put the boot in and not for the first time. "Inch by inch forward," he orders himself, as he crawls, spewing and fainting, resolutely out of the life he was born to."
"Immune to the courtiers' disgust, this pirate from the Putney riverbank ascends through the ranks to become Henry's most trusted guide. Eventually, even the bitter Duke of Norfolk comes to rely on him. After all, what can't he do? He knows the whole New Testament by heart; "He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury." If anyone can free the king from the trusses of his marriage, it is the blacksmith's son."
"The church protects its interests by murdering dissenters; reading the Bible in English is a crime punishable by death. This is what lies behind Henry's struggle with the Pope: the England of the common man, who can be ripped limb from limb for daring to suggest that "God on the altar is a piece of bread". By centring her narrative on the humane and free-thinking Thomas Cromwell, who believes in kindness, tolerance and education, Mantel has found a way to reconfigure the tired tale of Henry's lust and what it led to. Henry might want a son so desperately that he is willing to make war with the Pope, but Cromwell, who dreams of a nation that can talk and learn and worship freely, is revealed as the true author of England's independence."
It won both the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
(Review by Olivia Laing in The Guardian, 26 April 2009)

We recommend: Killer country

"Mike Nicol's Killer Country, which has been compared to Cormac McCarthy's classic No Country For Old Men, is the second of his bleak and powerful Revenge trilogy. Pylon and Mace are struggle veterans now working in Cape Town's security business, while many of their old comrades are on the opposite side of the fence, cheerfully looting the country they helped liberate." (Sunday Times review, 16 Jan 2011, by William Saunderson-Meyer)
The UP library also has the first book, "Payback", in stock.

We recommend: Green-eyed thieves

"Firoze and Ashraf Peer, the novel’s twin protagonists, have the potential to become literary heroes – characters created so compellingly that their lives and evils and triumphs reach well beyond the vehicles that house them.

You know the kind I mean: Hannibal Lecter. Dr Evil. Captain Jack Sparrow. The Yebo Gogo guys and Mo the Meerkat, from Vodacom. Bigger than their books, better than their movies and often brighter than their brands.

The crooked Peer brothers who wreak havoc from Sun City to the USA have the potential to wield that type of power. Indeed, their story is so fascinating, exquisitely penned, intelligent and rich in surprise as to warrant becoming a classic.

Green-Eyed Thieves speaks of inspired crime and brotherly betrayal; philosophy and family business – even introducing cameos for worthies like Mohammed Atta (of 9/11 fame) and President George Bush. It’s a wild romp. Read it."

(Review excerpts from: bookreviewsouthafrica.blogspot.com, by Tiffany Markman)

We recommend: Till we can keep an animal

"(This) fascinating debut novel was awarded the European Union Literary Award (in 2008)."
"It is the story of Susan, a woman in her fifties who is raped, then shot and killed by robbers in Cape Town."
"Susan relates the story of her death as a kind of omniscient narrator. When she is killed she doesn't go wherever it is dead people go. Instead, she hovers in the world between ours and the next, eavesdropping on the conversations of the living, reminiscing about her life. We, as readers, share in these reminiscences. In a deft way the narrative defies the cliché that dead people don't tell tales."
"The story's narrative poise and control means we are composed about many things that could possibly enrage us, sending us into tantrums. But we don't come out emotionless; Voysey-Braig is much too ruthless to let us go off easily; we feel a kind of a slow-burning, consuming rage at crime, the single biggest blight on South Africa's exemplary democracy."
"Till We Can Keep an Animal is not exactly an easy book to read, both in terms of its narrative structure and its subject. Perhaps it is worth the trouble, for forging a nation from disparate groups and interests is never easy." (Excerpts from a 2009 review by Percy Zvomuya in The Mail & Guardian)

We recommend: The Slap

The plot: "(a)n obnoxious child does something faintly threatening at a family barbecue, and the father of the threatened child smacks him. Everyone is so upset by this that the barbecue breaks up in a hurry, and (...) the parents of the slapped child have the slapper arrested."

"(A)ll the characters in The Slap are touchy, and that seems to be part of Tsiolkas's point – in the Australia of the 21st century, multiculturalism has won. People of all ages, all ethnic groups and all political persuasions are interconnected and intermarried, and, at least some of the time, they just can't handle it. The Slap, which was first published in Australia in 2008 and has since won the Commonwealth prize, is a "way we live now" novel, and it is riveting from beginning to end."
(Excerpts from a review by Jane Smiley in The Guardian: www.guardian.co.uk)