Zukiswa Wanner
l Thando Mgqolozana’s feminist take on one of the oldest stories told in Christendom, the story of the virgin birth. With Hear Me Alone, Mgqolozana moves from being a brilliant South African writer to being a brilliant writer. I’ve read it seven times and every time there is a fresh angle to make me laugh or sigh.
l The Helon Habila-edited The African Short Story, which showcases some of the best short stories from all over the continent in the last 40 years or so.
l The Commonwealth Prize Best Book, Memory of Love by Aminatta Forna, which, although it was published last year, I only got to read this year.
Henrietta Rose-Innes
l In Milnerton Market, David Southwood’s photos of this Cape Town street-trading institution perfectly capture its poignant quirkiness. The pleasures of this beautifully produced book include essays by Ivan Vladislavic, Ivor Powell and Michael Godby.
l Homemaking for the Down-at-Heart by Finuala Dowling is a luminous novel, full of a poet’s insights into mothers and daughters, mortality, emotional fortitude, late-night radio and seaside towns. Dowling is an extraordinarily empathetic, wise and funny writer.
l Cabin Fever by Diane Awerbuck is a collection of short stories that will lodge magical images deep in your mind. Awerbuck’s stories are wide-ranging and transcendent, exploring issues of trauma, history and redemption in a richly complex imaginative world.
l The Mall by the elusive SL Grey – the ground-breaking South African tale of horror that made us all a lot more jumpy at the tills.
Hamilton Wende
l Lost Ground by Michiel Heyns. Writer and journalist Peter Jacobs returns from self-imposed exile in London to the fictional town of Alfredville in the Little Karoo, where he grew up. He has come to investigate and write the story of the killing of his cousin Desireé. He soon finds himself on a journey into both murder and memory. The writing is sparse, illuminating, intricate and deeply intimate.
l Homemaking for the Down-at-Heart by Finuala Dowling. Set in middle-class Cape Town, this is a finely-wrought examination of the wonder and pain of our most ordinary moments.
l Cry Havoc by Simon Mann. A must-read for anyone interested in the extraordinarily stupid, greedy and racist notions that underlay the incompetent coup attempt by Mann and his co-conspirators in Equatorial Guinea in 2004.
l Dancing in the Glory of Monsters by Jason K Stearns. A sprawling monster of a book describing the collapse of Mobutu’s Zaire and the war that brought Laurent Kabila to power in the DRC and sucked in a number of other African countries directly and involved others behind the scenes.
Margie Orford
Short books are best for the ADD days of the silly season. So, to find short, riveting books at this time of year is a marvel.
l The Weekend by Bernard Schlink, author of The Reader. Schlink returns to Germany’s violent past. A German terrorist is released after 30 years in prison. His sister gathers old comrades, lovers and friends for his first weekend as a free man. Poignant, gripping. Beautifully written.
l The Cat’s Table by Michael Ondaatje is a gem. A young boy travels unaccompanied from Sri Lanka to Europe. Ondaatje’s limpid prose and masterful storytelling conjure up this child’s passage from boy to man. A must-read.
l As is Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus. This mesmerising novel about love, magic, cruelty and illusion will conjure you away from the horror of too many relatives in too small a space.
Chuma Nwokolo
l Open City by Teju Cole. The “open city” is New York, laid bare by the narrator’s contemplative walks. In a book shorn of thriller pace and dramatic incident, the reader with an eye for beauty sedately encounters the excitement of the finely-turned phrase and the eureka of the cinematographic sentence.
l Pride of the Spider Clan. Odili Ujubuonu’s Pride of the Spider Clan is the concluding novel of a trilogy set in said territory. It is a “quest” tale. Like Nii Ayikwei Parkes’s signal detective fiction Tail of the Blue Bird, which is set in the unapologetic milieu of a Ghanaian village, anything can happen from page to page – and often does. Riveting, intricately-drawn adventure.
Shafinaaz Hassim
l Paulo Coelho’s Aleph, which makes particular sense if you understand the journey of life, love and the intersection of individuals’ lives as less random, more charted.
l On the local scene, Hugh Lewin’s struggle memoir Stones Against the Mirror. The brutality of the tale may very well scar you, so take care. But this is not just a brutal story, it is a memoir of hope and redemption.
l I’m reading Kader Asmal’s heartwarming biography and my holiday reading includes Gillian Schutte’s new novel After Just Now, as well as the e-book of Tracey Farren’s novel, Snake.