In the age of the internet we are bombarded 24 hours a day with information – in snippets, fragments, great chunks – orally, visually, some interesting, some not, and often overwhelming.

A new approach to harvesting and communicating information is needed, and David McCandless has taken up the challenge. In the book Information is Beautiful he takes a staggeringly wide range of statistics from the internet and presents each one as a work of art. He interprets and challenges, shocks and entertains, surprises and amuses. He further explores our personal relationship with the internet, and our representation on it by using sources such as Google to harvest opinion and to profile the general public.

This extraordinary book is a revelation in so many ways – it is completely absorbing and engaging on both an intellectual and an artistic level, it is shocking and often very funny, and will make you deeply ponder things you have never previously dreamed of!

The latest edition of the McSweeney’s has been out for a little while, but we just can’t stop shouting about it. The good folk at McSweeney’s publishers are concerned (like many others) about the struggles of print media in general, and newspapers in particular. They decided to produce a once off truly amazing Sunday newspaper, the San Francisco Panorama, and in so doing provide a showcase for the kind of journalism that only newspapers can produce. They were also completely transparent about the process, conscious of the growing perception that quality newspapers will soon cease to be economically viable – so they detail what they spent on different parts of the production process, as well as showing how a quality newspaper (not on the scale of this monster) could be economically viable. The content is divided into ten sections: Main News, Section Two (long-form journalism), Sports, Arts One and Arts Two, Food, Comics, Opinion and Analysis, Magazine, and our favourite – Books. The 96 page book supplement includes reviews, conversations between writers, four line poems, short short stories (and some longer ones) and memorable little inserts such as the one which teaches you how to correctly pronounce the names of prominent authors whose names are regularly mangled (and it is here that we learn that the author of Disgrace is pronounced kut-SEE-uh, rather than COAT-see). The magazine supplement includes Michael Chabon on music and Chip Kidd doing a brilliant piece on Design and Redesign. The sport supplement offers a six page splurge on the World Series (that’s baseball), by one Stephen King. The comic supplement includes work by Daniel Clowes, Art Spiegelman, Chris Ware and other graphic luminaries. And then we have China Mieville on blockbuster movies, Nicholson Baker on the strange possibility that transferring information digitally is more environmentally destructive than printing it, and a host of other brilliant work by the likes of Chimamanda Adichie, Daniel Alarcon, Miranda July, Junot Diaz, Roddy Doyle etc etc. It’s crazy and brilliant.

Michael Beard is a Nobel prize-winning physicist whose best work is behind him. Trading on his reputation, he speaks for enormous fees, lends his name to the letterheads of renowned scientific institutions and half-heartedly heads a government-backed initiative tackling global warming. A compulsive womaniser, Beard finds his fifth marriage floundering. But this time it is different: she is having the affair, and he is still in love with her. When Beard’s professional and personal worlds collide in a freak accident, an opportunity presents itself for Beard to extricate himself from his marital mess, reinvigorate his career and save the world from environmental disaster. Ranging from the Arctic Circle to the deserts of New Mexico, Solar is a serious and darkly satirical novel, showing human frailty struggling with the most pressing and complex problem of our time. A story of one man’s greed and self-deception, this is a dark, funny and deeply thought-provoking read. In Michael Beard, brilliantly nuanced by McEwan, we find a complex character for whom we feel both revulsion and sympathy at the same time. Written in the flawless prose one has come to expect of a writer of McEwan’s stature, this is a truly wonderful read.

“Vivacious and sprawling, a beautifully and compellingly written novel…McEwan’s achievement is the brilliant creation of a flawed, larger than life character who all but walks off the page to shake your hand.”       The Times

“…the overarching plot pulls off a clinching novelistic coup, using comedy to sneak grimmer matters past the reader’s defences.”      Guardian

“Climate-change comedy that’s every bit as brilliant as its title suggests“     Sunday Times

In the middle of a desert ˜somewhere south of nowhere’, to a forlorn house made of metal and clapboard, a secret war adviser has gone in search of space and time. Richard Elster, seventy-three, was a scholar – an outsider – when he was called to a meeting with government war planners. For two years he tried to make intellectual sense of the troop deployments, counterinsurgency, orders for rendition. He was to map the reality these men were trying to create.

At the end of his service, Elster retreats to the desert, where he is joined by a young filmmaker intent on documenting his experience. Jim Finley wants to make a one-take film, Elster its single character – ˜Just a man against a wall.’

The two men sit on the deck, drinking and talking. Finley makes the case for his film. Weeks go by. And then Elster’s daughter Jessie visits – an ˜otherworldly’ woman from New York – who dramatically alters the dynamic of the story. When a devastating event follows, all the men’s talk, the accumulated meaning of conversation and isolation, is thrown into question. What is left is loss, fierce and incomprehensible.

Point Omega is a deeply unnerving and brilliant work from one of our greatest living writers.

“DeLillo is one of the greatest living American writers.“       Scotland on Sunday

“The brilliance of the book lies in DeLillo never once announcing that we are in Grand Theme territory. On the contrary, this unapologetic novel of ideas has its own stealthy logic. Written in a style that is frugal, frequently staccato, yet also displaying great flashes of spare beauty, DeLillo’s strange, haunting tale can be read as an extended meditation on the way we use the theoretical concepts and conceits as a bulwark against the sheer unknowingness of other people, let alone ourselves…this being a DeLillo novel, there are no answers to the vast metaphysical dilemmas of temporal existence. There are only the sort of densely posited questions that take you to all sorts of challenging places where you have forgotten that fiction can actually take you“               Douglas Kennedy, The Times

Celia’s mother died bringing her into the world – when one soul flies in, another flies out, her aunt Tassi says. So she lives with Tassi in Black Rock, Tobago, with her cousins and Tassi’s second husband Roman, a man so low he could crawl under a snake’s belly on stilts.

Everyone knows Roman is a bad man, but Tassi felt so lucky to have found someone willing to take on her clan that she latched onto him like a raft in the sea.

But Celia thinks that Roman is the devil, and when one day he does something that proves her right, Celia can’t bear to share a roof with him for even one more night. And so, she leaves for Trinidad, and a new life.

Tinged with a sense of the supernatural, Black Rock is a vivid, intensely moving novel.

“Amanda Smyth writes like a descendant of Jean Rhys. Black Rock is a powerful cocktail of heat and beautiful coolness, written in a heady, mesmerising yet translucent prose which marks Smyth out as a born novelist.”             Ali Smith

“In painterly images, Smyth evocatively shows more than she tells. Not only people but place exerts a powerful force…There are echoes of the archetypal ˜mad woman’, if not in an attic then in a marital room in the Caribbean, with scenes reminiscent of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea…this is a vivid and compelling story, exploring the extent of our control over our destinies.”          Anita Sethi, Independent

In a silent valley stands an isolated stone farmhouse, the Mas Lunel. Its owner is Aramon Lunel, an alcoholic so haunted by his violent past that he’s become incapable of all meaningful action, letting his hunting dogs starve and his land go to ruin. Meanwhile, his sister, Audrun, alone in her modern bungalow within sight of the Mas Lunel, dreams of exacting retribution for the unspoken betrayals that have blighted her life. Into this closed Cevenol world comes Anthony Verey, a wealthy but disillusioned antiques dealer from London. Now in his sixties, Anthony hopes to remake his life in France, and he begins looking at properties in the region. From the moment he arrives at the Mas Lunel, a frightening and unstoppable series of consequences is set in motion. Two worlds and two cultures collide. Ancient boundaries are crossed, taboos are broken, a violent crime is committed. And all the time the Cevennes hills remain, as cruel and seductive as ever, unforgettably captured in this powerful and unsettling novel, which reveals yet another dimension to Rose Tremain’s extraordinary imagination.

Psychologist Cass Seltzer’s book, The Variety of Religious Illusion, has become a surprise runaway bestseller. Dubbed ‘the atheist with a soul’, Cass’ sudden celebrity has upended his life and brought back the ghosts of his past, including an irrepressible former lover, a mentor with messianic fantasies and a six-year-old mathematical prodigy, heir to the dynasty of a strict fundamentalist community. Over the course of one week, Cass’ theories about our need to keep faith are borne out in ways he could never have imagined.

“The rare thing that Goldstein does to excellent effect is to sustain her discourse – her arguments and her puns and her jokes and her descriptions and her comparisons and contrasts…are effervescent and knowing…[36 Arguments for the Existence of God] is, in fact, a lovely dream. ”           Jane Smiley, Los Angeles Times

“Dazzling, sparked by frequent flashes of nonchalant brilliance…Affirms Ms. Goldstein’s position as a satirist and a seeker of real moral questions at a time when silly ones prevail.”     New York Times

“In her cerebral fiction [Goldstein] dances across disciplines with delight…36 Arguments radiates all the humour and erudition we’ve come to expect from Goldstein…Hilarious…You’ve got to place this novel among the very funniest [novel] ever written…Goldstein doesn’t want to shake your faith or confirm it, but she’ll make you a believer in the power of fiction.”    Washington Post

“A freewheeling satirical tale that is compelling, heady, and laced with a deliciously dark wit…Caustically irreverent, yet provocative and informative without being completely didactic. And somewhat surprisingly, by the end, it is also deeply touching.”      Boston Globe

“Rebecca Goldstein is a rare find among contemporary novelists: she has intellectual muscle as well as a tender emotional reach.”    Ian McEwan

From the author of the wonderful The Luminous Life of Lily Aphrodite comes a story of changing times and new struggles and hopes. New York, 1916. Monroe Simonov, a song-plugger from Brooklyn, is in love with a Ziegfeld Follies dancer who has left him for California. Inez Kennedy, a fashion model in a department store, has just one season remaining to find a wealthy husband before she must return to the Midwest. Ana Denisova, a glamorous political exile, gives lectures and writes letters while she waits for the Russian people to overthrow their Tsar. Then America joins the war, jazz sweeps the city’s dance floors, the old order is swept away by newly minted millionaires and the entire nation is gripped by the Red Scare. Although the world is changing faster than they could ever have imagined, Monroe, Inez and Ana discover that matters of the heart stay as they have ever been.

In a village far away, deep in a valley, all the animals and birds disappeared some years ago. Only the rebellious young teacher and an old man talk about animals to the children, who have never seen such (mythical) creatures. One wretched little boy has dreams of animals, begins to whoop like an owl, is regarded as an outcast, and eventually disappears. A stubborn, brave girl called Maya and her friend, Matti, are drawn to explore in the woods round the village. They know there are dangers beyond, and that at night Nehi the Mountain Demon comes down to the village. In a far-off cave, they come upon the vanished boy, content and self-sufficient. Eventually they find themselves in a beautiful garden paradise full of every kind of animal, bird and fish – the home of Nehi the Mountain Demon. The Demon is a pied piper figure who stole the animals from the village. He, too, was once a boy there, but he was different, mocked and reviled, treated as an outsider and outcast. This is his terrible revenge, one which has punished him too, by removing him from society and friendship, and every few years he draws another child or two to join him in his fortress Eden. He lets the two children return to the village, telling them that one day, when people are less cruel and his desire for vengeance has crumbled, perhaps the animals might come back…

“An extraordinary tale.”         The Scotsman

“…a children’s fable and an allegory of adults. It may be a fast read, but it has enormous resonances.”          Independent

The four narratives which make up this posthumous collection draw upon William Styron’s experiences in the US Marine Corps, and give us an insight into the early life of one of America’s greatest modern writers. Styron earned his commission as second lieutenant in the U.S Marine Corps in 1945, shortly after his twentieth birthday. He was scheduled to participate in the assault on mainland Japan, most likely as the leader of a mortar platoon, but in early August the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ending the war. Before he was discharged Styron served a six-week stint as an officer at the military prison on Harts Island in Long Island Sound. Early in 1951, as he was composing the last two chapters of his first novel Lie Down in Darkness, Styron was recalled into the Marine Corps for service in Korea.

The stories of The Suicide Run are set in the gruelling camps and sweltering training fields that marked the limbo between civilian life and the horrors of war. Fictional yet autobiographical, the narratives of this collection focus on young men who, broiling in the claustrophobia of military life, always conscious of the imminence of action, try to maintain their sanity in the wake of their abrupt removal from normal life. Imbued with a sense of frustration and looming fear, keenly rendered in Styron’s pithy and acutely observational prose, this collection is a fascinating insight into military life and the ‘mysterious community of men’ that comprises the US Marine Corps, and a glimpse into the mind of a mighty writer.

We love books like this which provide a showcase for some of the serious writing talent that we’re fortunate enough to have in South Africa. Home Away contains 24 pieces, each set in a different city round the world an hour apart from the previous one. The contributors range from established literary voices to promising newcomers. We feel uncomfortable highlighting particular pieces as there are so many examples of outstanding writing in Home Away. A perfect book to dip into now and then, or from which to read a chapter a night. Alternatively you may find yourself devouring the whole 24 hours in one sitting – either way it’s definitely worth checking out.

Poor Judd Foxman returns home early to find his wife in bed with his boss – in the act. He now faces the twin threats of both divorce and unemployment. His misery is compounded further with the sudden death of his father. He is then asked to come and ‘sit Shiva’ for his newly deceased parent with his angry, screwed up and somewhat estranged brothers and sisters in his childhood home. It is there he must confront who he really is and – more importantly – who he can become. Funny, moving, powerful and poignant. This Is Where I Leave You is the fabulous follow up to How To Talk to a Widower and a marvellous read.

Ovid’s Metamorphoses has influenced artists for over two thousand years. If you are interested in Classical mythology but can’t quite remember who’s who, this is a great introduction to the most important classical myths. If you want to understand the classical allusions in the work of Chaucer; Botticelli; Shakespeare or Bob Dylan, what better source than the one they used?

Metamorphoses (transformations) tells the stories of almost 250 myths, centred around the theme of transformation. The myths are set outdoors, where people are most vulnerable to the influences of the gods’ and goddesses’ caprices. People turn into constellations, trees, rocks and in one memorable instance a hermaphrodite. A.D. Melville has done a beautiful job of translating Ovid’s Latin hexameters into free verse, while staying true to Ovid’s utterly compelling, sexy and frequently funny style. If you want to read one of the myths to see if you like Ovid, I recommend you try ˜Salmacis and Hermaphroditus’, starting on page 83 of the Oxford edition.

In The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry, introduced and edited by Ilya Kaminsky and Susan Harris, poetic visions from the 20th century are reinforced and in many ways revised. Alongside renowned masters, there will be many new discoveries – internationally celebrated poets who have rarely, if ever, been translated into English. In conjunction with the organisation Words Without Borders – an online haven for international literature and an ally to writers all over the world – Ecco presents an anthology that may well serve as a canonical touchstone in the field of poetics, bringing voices from afar to readers everywhere.

As aptly put in Words Without Borders’ mission statement, this collection also serves as part of “the ultimate aim to introduce exciting international writing to the general and literary public – travellers, teachers, students, publishers, and a new generation of eclectic readers – by presenting international literature not as a static, elite phenomenon, but a portal through which to explore the world.”

Because I am a girl I am less likely to go to school. Because I am a girl I am more likely to suffer from malnutrition. Because I am a girl I am more likely to suffer violence in the home. Because I am a girl I am more likely to marry and start a family before I reach my twenties. Seven authors have visited seven different countries and spoken to young women and girls about their lives, struggles and hopes. Featuring Tom Butcher, Xiaolu Guo, Deborah Moggach, Joanne Harris, Kathy Lette, Marie Phillips and Irvine Welsh, the result is an extraordinary collection of writings about prejudice, abuse, and neglect, but also about courage, resilience and changing attitudes. Proceeds from sales of this book will go to PLAN, one of the world’s largest child-centered community development organisations.

When Sofia Behrs married Count Leo Tolstoy, the author of War and Peace, husband and wife regularly exchanged diaries covering the years from 1862 to 1910. Sofia s life was not an easy one: she idealised her husband, but was tormented by him; even her many children were not an unmitigated blessing. In the background of her life was one of the most turbulent periods of Russian history – the transition from feudal Russia to the three revolutions and three major international wars. Yet it is as Sofia Tolstoy s own life story, the study of one woman s private experience, that the diaries are most valuable and moving. They are a testament to a woman of tremendous vital energy and poetic sensibility who, in the face of provocation and suffering, continued to strive for the higher things in life and remained indomitable.

As Doris Lessing writes in her foreword “This is a book which is interesting for what it says about the predicament of women in the past, and how that compares to their present circumstances. While reading it, I was so enthralled that I found myself dreaming about Sofia, about speaking to her myself, desperately wanting to reach out to her and offer her words of comfort for her pain.”

The Big Short tells a story of spectacular, epic folly. It has taken the world’s greatest financial meltdown to bring Michael Lewis back to the subject that made him famous. His international bestseller Liar’s Poker exposed the greed and carnage of the City and Wall Street in the 1980s; he wrote it as a cautionary tale, but people seem to have read it as a how-to guide. Now, he wants to settle accounts. In this visceral tour to the heart of the financial system, Michael Lewis takes us around the globe and back decades to trace the origins of the current crisis. He meets the people who saw it coming, the people who were asleep at the wheel and the people who were actively driving us all of cliff. How could we have all been so deluded for quite so long? Where did it all start? Was it systemic? Was it avoidable? And who the hell can we blame? Michael Lewis has the answers. No one is better qualified to get to the heart of this labyrinthine story. And no one can make it such an enjoyable ride along the way.

 

“If you read only one book about the causes of the recent financial crisis, let it be Michael Lewis’s, The Big Short.”        Washington Post

“The Big Short is superb: Michael Lewis doing what he does best, illuminating the idiocy, madness and greed of modern finance…But what truly sets Michael Lewis apart from other writers is his craft…the end result is devastating.”          Salon

“Eagerly anticipated…A triumph…Lewis builds the tension of this tug-of-war expertly, so much so that The Big Short reads like a thriller.”          The Times

“Lewis creates magnificent financial set-pieces.”        Guardian

Operation Kronstadt not only reveals the early days of intelligence services but also uncovers a truly dramatic story from the Russian Revolution involving a daring rescue attempt and a ˜mission impossible’ against the best defended naval target in Russia. By May 1919, when the power struggle between former Tsarists and Bolsheviks hangs in the balance, the only British agent in Russia is trapped and in mortal danger. Mansfield Cumming (the first ˜C’) dreams up an audacious and probably suicidal plan to rescue him, and a young naval officer is sent with a specially selected team into the jaws of the Soviet fleet. This is the remarkable true story of the spy Paul Dukes (the only MI6 officer to be knighted for work in the field) and Gus Agar, whose extraordinary escapade won him the Victoria Cross. Harry Ferguson is a former MI6 officer and an undercover agent for the National Investigation Service (NIS).

As well as a being a truly gripping story, unbelievable were it not true, it also reveals how very flawed MI6 was. Indeed when this book was submitted to them for approval, they encouraged its publication, on the grounds that it would show that MI6, too, had often made mistakes!

“Ferguson’s account of both sets of operations is exciting and his enthusiasm is infectious.”           Sunday Telegraph

Throughout history, food has done more than simply provide sustenance. It has acted as a tool of social transformation, political organisation, geopolitical competition, industrial development, military conflict and economic expansion. An Edible History of Humanity is an account of how food has helped to shape and transform societies around the world, from the emergence of farming in China by 7,500 BCE to today’s use of sugar cane and corn to make ethanol. Food has been a kind of technology, a tool that has changed the course of human progress. It helped to found, structure, and connect together civilisations worldwide, and to build empires and bring about a surge in economic development through industrialisation. Food has been employed as a military and ideological weapon. And today, in the culmination of a process that has been going on for thousands of years, the foods we choose in the supermarket connect us to global debates about trade, development and the adoption of new technologies. Drawing from many fields including genetics, archaeology, anthropology, ethno-botany and economics, the story of these food-driven transformations is a fully satisfying account of the whole of human history.

When Rachel Polonsky went to live in Moscow, she found an apartment block in Romanov Street, once a residence of the Soviet elite. One of those ghostly neighbours was Stalin’s henchman Vyacheslav Molotov. In Molotov’s former apartment, Rachel Polonsky discovered his library and an old magic lantern. Molotov – ruthless apparatchik, participant in the collectivisations and the Great Purge – was also an ardent bibliophile. Molotov’s library and his magic lantern became the prisms through which Rachel Polonsky renewed her vision of Russia. She visited cities and landscapes associated with the books in the library – Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Akhmatova and many less well-known figures. Some were sent to the Gulag by the man who collected their books. She writes exceptionally well about the longings and aspirations of Russian writers in the course of a journey that takes her to the Arctic and Siberia, the Crimean summer and Lake Baikal, from the forests around Moscow to the vast steppes. In each place, she encountered the spirit of great artists and the terrible past of a country ravaged by war, famine, and totalitarianism.

“Everywhere on this journey, Polonsky shows great curiosity about the web of personality and history, the connections between power and literature that form Russian history and society today, her erudition is always lightly worn…I was gripped by this book.”   Simon Sebag Montefiore

“I’m not a Russianist, but one doesn’t need to be a Russianist, or even to have any pre-existing strong interest in Russia, to recognise this book as a quite brilliant work – or to be compelled by it. Part of my great admiration for it comes from Rachel’s style, which is continuously and unarchly elegant. I don’t think I found a single sentence out of the tens of thousands I read that I wanted written any differently…Its erudition would be alarming, were it not so gracefully and wittily worn…A huge intellectual and stylistic achievement…It’s been a privilege to read the book.”      Robert Macfarlane

While speaking at a memorial event for her father, Siri Hustvedt suffered a violent seizure from the neck down. She managed to finish her talk and the paroxysms stopped, but not for good. Again and again she found herself a victim of the shudders. What had happened? Was it the onset of epilepsy? Was it a hysterical seizure or a bizarre form of panic attack? Hustvedt decided to chronicle her search for the shaking woman. Her exploration takes the reader on a journey into the offices of psychiatrists, neurologists, and psychoanalysts. It unearths stories and theories from the annals of medical history, contemporary brain research, as well as literature and philosophy. She discovers that although each discipline offers a distinct perspective on the problem, there is no ready solution.

This is a book about the mysteries of illness and the complexities of diagnosis. In The Shaking Woman Hustvedt synthesises her personal experience and years of research into a seamless narrative that investigates the age-old dilemmas of the mental and the physical, the mind and the body and what it means to be human.

“Provocative but often funny, encyclopaedic but down to earth…It brings together an extraordinary double story: that of Hustvedt’s own odyssey of discovery, and of that point where brain and mind, neurology and psychiatry, come together in the realm of neuropsychoanalysis. The odyssey has not cured her, nor led to a conclusion but Hustvedt’s erudite book deepens one’s wonder about the relation of body and mind.”          Oliver Sacks

Evelyn Waugh was the last of the great letter-writers, and his witty, elegant correspondence to a wide circle of friends contains more than a touch of malice. In the 1920s Waugh wrote to a school friend about his undergraduate escapades at Oxford and the Harold Acton and Henry Green of his unhappy jobs, his literary plans and the break-up of his first marriage. In the 1930s his boisterous letters recount his successes, social life and travels in South America. During the war, writing to his second wife, Laura Herbert, he revealed the strength of his love for her more vividly than has appeared elsewhere. He was inspired by Ann Fleming, Lady Diana Cooper and Nancy Mitford. Politics are rarely mentioned and he discusses writing only with someone he recognises as an equal, like Graham Greene. His deeply felt religious beliefs are expressed to John Betjeman. But Waugh’s main concern is to amuse – and in this he is triumphantly successful.

The author is the son of broadcaster and adventurer Macdonald Hastings and journalist and gardening writer Anne Scott-James. One of his grandfathers was a literary editor while the other wrote plays and essays, and penned an enchanting memoir of his own Victorian childhood. His great-uncle was an African hunter who wrote poetry and became one of Max’s heroes. The author tells a richly picaresque story, featuring guest appearances by a host of celebrities from Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad to John Betjeman and Osbert Lancaster, who became Anne Scott-James’s third husband. “All families are dysfunctional“, Anne asserted impenitently to Max, but the Hastingses managed to be more dysfunctional than most. His father roamed the world for newspapers and as a presenter for BBC TV’s legendary Tonight programme, while his mother edited Harper’s Bazaar, became a famous columnist and wrote best-selling gardening books.

Here, the author brings together this remarkable cast of forebears, ‘a tribe of eccentrics’, as he himself characterises them. By turns moving, dramatic and comic, the book portrays Max’s own childhood fraught with rows and explosions, in which the sudden death of a television set was only one highlight. His story will make a lot of people laugh and perhaps a few cry. It helps to explain why Max Hastings, whose family has produced more than eighty books over three generations, felt bound to follow their path of high adventure and popular journalism.

“Richly rewarding…a minor masterpiece…the book is extremely funny in places, extremely poignant in others and extremely well-written throughout – in fact, I haven’t enjoyed anything so much in ages.”            Sunday Telegraph

“Family histories can often be pretty deadly and journalists memoirs doubly so. Few of them, however, are written with as much skill and sensitivity as this one. Moving without being mawkish, Hastings’s book is a trove of marvellous stories.”              Sunday Times

“This brave and poignant book is the self-portrait of a supremely talented outsider who has spent his life trying to live up to his father’s achievements…what is beyond doubt is that Sir Max has exceeded the pinnacle of his parents’ aspirations for themselves.”                Daily Telegraph

“Regretful, wise and forthright…deals with unnecessary cruelties and self delusions and ends with a sense of completion and understanding.”                Andrew Marr, Financial Times

The City of Cape Town is heading for disaster and is already in deep crisis if one cares to look close enough. The recent proliferation of public construction, public squares and public housing along the N2 towards the airport is little more than a mirage compared with the direction of more underlying trends. Cape Town’s grim future is born out of the confluence of the globalised economic and ecological collapse that is fast becoming the defining feature of the twenty-first century. It is manifested most starkly in the dire situation that faces the majority of the city’s residents, who are excluded from the formal economy and must rely on substandard public services and their own makeshift shelters. The scenario is serious enough to draw everyone’s attention but should be set against the broader issues of long-term economic resilience and environmental sustainability to achieve a low-carbon society – so we have our work cut out for us. The purpose of this volume is to demystify these challenges and present readers with a creative portfolio of thinking, practice and strong vision to show that we can find alternatives – and, moreover, that these alternatives are already emerging in (marginal) sections of the state, civil society and the business sectors.

Edgar Pieterse is holder of the NRF Research Chair in Urban Policy. He directs the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town. Edgar is a member of Isandla Institute, serves on the board of Magnet Theatre, The Sustainability Institute and the Cape Town Partnership.

Match Prints is a visual and editorial dialogue between two important photographers and longtime friends. Jim Marshall was one of the foremost photographers of the rock music scene in the 1960s and 1970s; Timothy White is one of the most in-demand music and Hollywood photographers working today. Over their twenty-year friendship, Tim and Jim discovered that their work had striking similarities, despite time differences of as much as 20 or 30 years, whether the image reflected a common pose or expression, a common prop or situation. This book includes pairings of their selection – of popular musicians and actors – in a dynamic composition on every spread. Jim Morrison and Robert Mitchum; Bob Dylan and Julia Roberts; Robert Plant and Nicole Kidman; and, Shelley Winters and Shirley MacLaine – these are just four examples of the compelling pairings selected especially for the book. Throughout are anecdotes about the photographs by their subjects, among them Keith Richards, Jon Bon Jovi, Slash, Aretha Franklin, Alice Cooper, and Joan Baez. Whether poignant, dramatic, hilarious, or shocking, these are powerful portraits by two masters of the genre.

The City of Cape Town’s Arts and Culture Department and Cape Town Opera have published a beautiful book of photographs, entitled The Art and the Passion to celebrate Cape Town Opera’s 10th anniversary.

The book offers a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the preparations for productions that Cape Town Opera hosted in 2009, capturing intimate moments as artists prepare for their performances.

Stunning photographs - intimate moments from behind the scenes, as the singers prepare, rehearse and celebrate opera – are interwoven with comments by the artists, directors, make-up artists, technicians and backstage personnel.

Says Adriaan Fuchs of Cape Town Opera “Our work is so fleeting – a few performances and the productions are over. It will be great to have a book which celebrates and captures in a beautiful way what we do. People will not see shots from the front of the stage. It’s not about how grand or how big our sets were. It’s about trying to capture the very human elements backstage.”

 

The Ballets Russes was a phenomenon of the early twentieth century, permeating daily life wherever the company traveled and leaving a lasting impact on dance, theater, and the visual arts. Sergei Diaghilev, impresario from 1909 until his death in 1929, fused the most avant-garde, groundbreaking movements in dance, choreography, art, design, and costume into unique and stunning productions. The work was exciting, and always new, and it stretched the limits of the possible in art. The color, form, and material in costume and set design astonished audiences, transforming every corner of Western culture in the twentieth century.

Fashion and decor designers and visual artists in particular”including Coco Chanel, Natalia Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, Léon Bakst, and Pablo Picasso”found inspiration in the Ballets Russes. Designers and artists moved past old boundaries and created costumes and set designs for these extravagant productions, bridging the gaps between tangible and abstract artistic genres.

The Ballets Russes and the Art of Design is a beautiful illustrated volume which explores these revolutionary icons and ideas, illuminating Sergei Diaghilev’s profound revitalisation of the arts, which continues to influence us today. Ten essays by internationally recognized experts and 200 color and black-and-white illustrations ” many from private collections and never-before-published ” discuss a broad range of topics, including set and costume designs, graphic design and poster art, photographs and postcards, Diaghilev’s presence in the media, and private and museum collections of Ballets Russes treasures.

There are few author-illustrators who can wear the golden jacket of being great at both. Drum roll please for the man who is adored, Mister Oliver Jeffers, who has brought us the story of the boy and the penguin in Lost and Found and the hungry reader in The Incredible Book Eating Boy. He has written his first story about a girl, and darn, she is going to be unforgetable.

The Heart and the Bottle is a simple tale told from the perspective of a little girl, beautifully capturing the charming sense of wonder and curiousity at this amazing earth from a child’s viewpoint. The girl has a father figure who helps her discover things every day and through the magical illustrations their love for each other is clear. It all changes in an instant when on the next page, we see the empty chair and immediately understand that a loss has occurred. Anybody who has ever lost a loved one, or felt the stabbing pain of mourning, will understand that words cannot describe that feeling, but Jeffers draws pictures straight from the hurt in breathtaking understanding of how once we have loved and lost, we are scared to try again. And so the heart gets placed in the bottle for preservation.

It is only when as an adult, she is touched by the curiosities of another young child, that she remembers the time when she felt that same sense of wonder and removes her heart from the bottle.

Jeffers tackles the traditionally adult theme of love and loss and all of the sadness and brings it to a level of human understanding that surpasses age. This is the book you want to give someone you care about instead of a shiny Hallmark sympathy card. Thank you Oliver Jeffers, you once again created an exquisite masterpiece to share.

 

Persephone Books reprints neglected classics by C20th (mostly women) writers. Each one in our collection of 86 books is intelligent, thought-provoking and beautifully written, and most are ideal presents or a good choice for reading groups. They are beautifully designed, and stand well together as a collection. Here are just a few examples…

The World that was Ours by Hilda Bernstein is about the events leading up to the 1964 Rivonia Trial when Hilda Bernstein’s husband was acquitted but Mandela and the ‘men of Rivonia’ received life sentences “This has survived as a South African classic not just because it’s beautifully written,” wrote Anthony Sampson in the Spectator, “but because it conveys the combination of ordinariness and danger which is implicit in any totalitarian state.” “It reads like a thriller page after page… The loveliest of Hilda Bernstein’s works about the ugliest of her times” said Albie Sachs

Agnes Jekyll, the author of Kitchen Essays (1922), was sister-in-law to the great Gertrude Jekyll, whose biographer wrote that if she “was an artist-gardener, then Agnes was an artist-housekeeper“. Agnes was a famous hostess (the guests at her first dinner party included Browning, Ruskin and Burne-Jones) and her home, Munstead House, “was the apogee of opulent comfort and order without grandeur, smelling of pot-pourri, furniture polish and wood smoke“.

The Making of a Marchioness by Frances Hodgson Burnett – Little Lord Fauntleroy and The Secret Garden are enduring bestsellers, but this 1901 novel is many people’s favourite: Nancy Mitford and Marghanita Laski loved it, and some US college courses teach it alongside Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre. Part I, the original Marchioness, is in the Cinderella tradition, while Part II, called The Methods of Lady Walderhurst, is an absorbing melodrama - most novels end ‘and they lived happily ever after’ but this one develops into a realistic commentary on late-Victorian marriage.

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day by Winifred Watson is about a governess sent by an employment agency to the wrong address, where she encounters a glamorous night-club singer, Miss LaFosse. “The sheer fun, the light-heartedness” in this wonderful 1938 book “feels closer to a Fred Astaire film than anything else” comments Henrietta Twycross-Martinin her preface, who found Miss Pettigrew for Persephone Books. The Guardian asked: “Why has it taken more than half a century for this wonderful flight of humour to be rediscovered?”

The Book Lounge is delighted to announce a new partnership with Jacana Media and the Cape Times that will see 10% of sales during Jacana launches at the shop donated to Equal Education, the NGO fighting for access to better education for all South Africans.

From next week at all Jacana launches at the Book Lounge, ten percent of the sales of the book we’re launching will be donated to Equal Education to aid their brilliant and essential campaign to stock school libraries. Thanks to our partners in this – Jacana and the Cape Times. In addition, The Bookery (collection point for Equal Education) have supplied us with a rather striking collection bin for donations of books for the school libraries. Please have a scratch around at home and see if you have any books that are in decent condition and appropriate for school libraries and drop them off here. Many thanks.

“I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.”    George Robert Gissing

“A book is like a garden carried in the pocket.”        Chinese Proverb

“There’s nothing to match curling up with a good book when there’s a repair job to be done around the house.”     Joe Ryan