For almost three years, local newspapers were dominated by the saga of the Inge Lotz murder, and the subsequent trial and – supposedly controversial – acquittal of her boyfriend Fred van der Vyver. Antony Altbeker, the leading authority on crime and policing issues in South Africa, became interested in the case after being presented with numerous allegations of evidence fabrication by Van der Vyver’s brother. At first sceptical because of the sheer scale of these allegations, Altbeker’s interest was rapidly piqued, and he ended up following the entire trial in court, with this book the result.

Written with the tautness of the best procedural crime thrillers, this is an incredibly disturbing account of an outrageous series of procedural flaws and frauds perpetrated by the State and the police with the single-minded intention of convicting Van der Vyver at all costs. Altbeker is superb at unraveling both the minutiae of the forensic evidence that formed the basis of the trial, and deconstructing the oral evidence that was led over its course. But these technical details aside, it is Altbeker’s sociological asides (on the self-image of the justice system, for example, or the turn of Afrikaans youth to charismatic Christianity) that make this a transcendently important book, and his outrage at the blatant manipulation and invention of evidence, as well as the frequently distorted media coverage of the issue, is all the more effective for its restraint. It’s a story that would be hard to believe, were it not so convincingly argued.

In Dreams in a Time of War, Ngugi wa Thiong’o paints a mesmerising portrait of a young boy’s experiences in an African nation in flux. Beginning in the late 1930s, this moving and entertaining memoir describes Ngugi’s day-to-day life as the fifth child of his father’s third wife, in a family that included twenty-four children born to four different mothers. Against the backdrop of World War II, which affected the lives of Africans under British colonial rule in unexpected ways, Ngugi spent his childhood as the apple of his mother’s eye before attending school to slake what was then considered a bizarre thirst for learning.

As he grows up, the wider political and social changes occurring in Kenya begin to impinge on the boy’s life in both inspiring and frightening ways. Through telling the story of his grandparents and parents, and of his brothers’ involvement on different sides of the violent Mau Mau uprising, he takes us back to a momentous period in Kenyan history, deftly evoking a bygone era, capturing the landscape, the people and their culture, and the social and political vicissitudes of life under colonial rule and war.

Ngugi wa Thiong’o is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the university of California, Irvine, and is director of the university’s International Centre for Writing and Translation. His books include Petals of Blood, for which he was imprisoned by the Kenyan government in 1977 and Wizard of the Crow, Weep Not Child, The River Between and A Grain of Wheat.

Deo arrived in America from Burundi in search of a new life. Having survived a civil war and genocide, plagued by horrific dreams, he comes to New York with two hundred dollars, no English and no contacts. He ekes out a precarious existence delivering groceries, living in Central Park, and learning English by reading dictionaries in bookshops. Then Deo begins to meet the strangers who will change his life, eventually pointing him in the direction of Columbia University, medical school, and a life devoted to healing. Pulitzer Prize Winner Tracy Kidder breaks new ground in telling this unforgettable true story as he travels with Deo, looking back over a turbulent life in search of meaning. Strength in What Remains is an inspiring account of one man’s remarkable journey of suffering and survival, and of the ordinary people who helped him turn his life around. The book was Amazon.com’s Best Non-Fiction Book of 2009.

Some would call Detective Benny Griessel a legend. Others would call him a drunk.

Either way, he has trodden on too many toes over the years ever to reach the top of the promotion ladder, and now he concentrates on staying sober and mentoring the new generation of crime fighters – mixed race, Xhosa and Zulu. But when an American backpacker disappears in Capetown, panicked politicians know who to call: Benny has just thirteen hours to save the girl, save his career – and crack open a conspiracy which threatens the whole country. Meyer manages perfectly to capture the balance between and taut, fast-paced thriller, and an acute observation of life as it is lived in South Africa – in all its glory and horror. Highly recommended.

“One of the sharpest and most perceptive thriller writers around.”         The Times    

“Far and away the best crime writer in South Africa.”             Guardian

“Tough in-your-face crime writing that spares nothing in language, visceral scenes of blood and mayhem (for Meyer is adroit at choreographing descriptions of slaughter), and never wavers from the compelling pace of the story. It also has a mean line in humour that comes through in the snappy dialogue.”         Sunday Independent

 

“Deon Meyer, who writes in Afrikaans, portrays a world of terrifying uncertainty, in which those who fought for liberation from apartheid are having to come to terms with the knowledge that freedom is not enough to wipe out cruelty. A thoughtful and exciting novel.”      Times Literary Supplement

Berlin, 1940, and the city is filled with fear. At the house on 55 Jablonski Strasse, its various occupants try to live under Nazi rule in their different ways: the bullying Hitler loyalists the Persickes, the retired judge Fromm and the unassuming couple Otto and Anna Quangel. Then the Quangels receive the news that their beloved son has been killed fighting in France. Shocked out of their quiet existence, they begin a silent campaign of defiance, and a deadly game of cat and mouse develops between the Quangels and the ambitious Gestapo inspector Escherich. When petty criminals Kluge and Borkhausen also become involved, deception, betrayal and murder ensue, tightening the noose around the Quangels’ necks…

This is a gripping and chilling novel, a true portrait of life under Nazi rule, soaked in paranoia. Despite the darkness of the subject matter, there are moments of levity, warmth and humour. Michael Hofmann has done a brilliant job of the translation and the novel rings as true and modern now as it must have done when first published in 1947.

Hans Fallada was one of the best-known German writers of the twentieth century. Born in 1893 in Greifswald as Rudolf Wilhelm Adolf Ditzen, he took his pen name from a Brothers Grimm fairy tale. His most famous works include the novels Little Man, What Now? and The Drinker. Fallada died from an overdose of morphine on 5 February 1947 in Berlin.

“The greatest book ever written about German resistance to the Nazis.”          Primo Levi

“Fallada assembles a cast of vivid low-life characters, stoolies, thieves and whores.”       James Buchan, Guardian

“Visceral, chilling…has the suspense of a Le Carré novel.”        New Yorker

“A classic study of a paranoid society. Fallada’s scope is extraordinary. Alone in Berlin is…as morally powerful as anything I’ve ever read.”              Telegraph

“First published in Germany in 1947 and evoking the horror of life in Germany in the Second World War. A rediscovered masterpiece that makes you want to seek out more works by this great chronicler of events in my own lifetime.”         Barry Humphries, Books of the Year, Sunday Telegraph

“[This novel] suggests that resistance to evil is rarely straightforward, mostly futile, and generally doomed. Yet to the novel’s aching, unanswered question: ‘Does it matter?’ there is in this strange and compelling story to be found a reply in the affirmative. Primo Levi had it right: This is the great novel of German resistance. “           Richard Flanagan (author of Wanting)

“What Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française did for wartime France after six decades in obscurity, Fallada does for wartime Berlin…[Alone in Berlin] has something of the horror of Conrad, the madness of Dostoyevsky and the chilling menace of Capote’s In Cold Blood.”          New York Times

Fate takes many forms. When a letter from an elderly taxidermist drops onto Henry’s doormat it poses a puzzle that he cannot resist. As he is pulled closer to the world of this strange and calculating man, Henry becomes increasingly involved with the lives of a donkey and a howler monkey – named Beatrice and Virgil – and the epic journey they undertake together. With all the charm and spirit that brought over seven million readers worldwide to Booker Prize-winning Life of Pi, this novel takes the reader on a tremendous imaginative odyssey. On the way Martel asks profound questions about the nature of human cruelty, kindness and the liberating power of stories.

An old man lies dying. Confined to bed in his living room, he sees the walls around him begin to collapse, the windows come loose from their sashes, and the ceiling plaster fall off in great chunks, showering him with a lifetime of debris: newspaper clippings, old photographs, wool jackets, rusty tools, and the mangled brass works of antique clocks. Soon, the clouds from the sky above plummet down on top of him, followed by the stars, till the black night covers him like a shroud. He is hallucinating, in death throes from cancer and kidney failure. A methodical repairer of clocks, he is now finally released from the usual constraints of time and memory to rejoin his father, an epileptic, itinerant peddler, whom he had lost seven decades before. In his return to the wonder and pain of his impoverished childhood in the backwoods of Maine, he recovers a natural world that is at once indifferent to man and inseparable from him, menacing and awe inspiring. Heartbreaking and life affirming, Tinkers is an elegiac meditation on love, loss, and the fierce beauty of nature.

Winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize For Fiction: the first debut to win this major award in ten years.

A newly widowed woman has done a runner. She just jumped in her car, abandoned her (very nice) house in north London and kept on driving until she reached the Norfolk coast. Now she’s rented a tiny cottage and holed herself away there, if only to escape the ceaseless sympathy and insincere concern. She’s not quite sure, but thinks she may be having a bit of a breakdown. Or perhaps this sense of dislocation is perfectly normal in the circumstances. All she knows is that she can’t sleep and may be drinking a little more than she ought to. But as her story unfolds we discover that her marriage was far from perfect. That it was, in fact, full of frustration and disappointment, as well as one or two significant secrets, and that by running away to this particular village she might actually be making her own personal pilgrimage. By turns elegiac and highly comical, The Widow’s Tale conjures up this most defiantly unapologetic of narrators as she begins to pick over the wreckage of her life and decides what has real value and what she should leave behind.

The long awaited third novel from the Booker Prize shortlisted author of Five Boys and The Underground Man.

“Very funny. You never know this woman’s name but, my God, you know her voice…The Widow’s Tale more than equals [Jackson's] astonishing debut. He’s back.”          The Times

“It is the widow’s vulnerable sassiness that lingers longest in the memory. Jackson delights in detailing her anxieties and obsessions…weaving them into a thoroughly convincing and often very funny emotional portrait.”             Sunday Telegraph

“Finely-judged…her Tale perfectly captures the disorientation that comes with grief and brings it to life against the big skies, grainy light and salt tang of an east coast winter.”          Guardian

“Jackson’s widow, with her tart observations about life and men, is great company. Like a glass of spicy red wine, this is a book to swig back and enjoy.”            Daily Mail

At the end of Oh, Play That Thing, the second volume of Roddy Doyle’s wonderful trilogy about Henry Smart, Henry - his leg severed in an accident with a railway boxcar, crawls into the Utah desert to die – only to be discovered by John Ford, who’s there shooting his latest Western. Ford recognises a fellow Irish rebel and determines to turn Henry’s story – a boy volunteer at the GPO in 1916, a hitman for Michael Collins, a republican legend – into a film. He appoints him ‘IRA consultant’ on his new film, The Quiet Man.

The Dead Republic opens in 1951. Henry is returning to Ireland for the first time since his escape in 1922. With him are the stars of Ford’s film, John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara, and the famous director himself, ‘Pappy’, who in a series of intense, highly charged meetings has tried to suck the soul out of Henry and turn it into Hollywood gold-dust. Ten years later Henry is in Dublin, working in Ratheen as a school caretaker, nicknamed ‘Hoppy Henry’ by the boys on account of his wooden leg. When he is caught in a bomb blast, that wooden leg gets left behind. He finds himself a hero: the old IRA veteran who’s lost his leg to a UVF bomb. Wheeled out by the Provos, Henry is to find he will have other uses too, when the peace process begins in deadly secrecy…In three brilliant novels, A Star Called Henry, Oh, Play That Thing and The Dead Republic, Roddy Doyle has told the whole history of Ireland in the twentieth century. And in the person of his hero, he has created one of the great characters of modern fiction.

This is a story. In this ingenious and spell-binding retelling of the life of Jesus, Philip Pullman revisits the most influential story ever told. Charged with mystery, compassion and enormous power, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ throws fresh light on who Jesus was and asks the reader questions that will continue to resonate long after the final page is turned. For, above all, this book is about how stories become stories.

Written with unstinting authority, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ is a pithy, erudite, subtle, and powerful book by a controversial and beloved author. It is a text to be read and reread, studied and unpacked, much like the Good Book itself.

“Incendiary…A small gem or, given its explosive story and exquisite artistry, a hand grenade made by Faberge. Pullman is a craftsman of the highest order.”               Sunday Times

“Pullman is a supreme storyteller who…has done the story [of the Gospels] a service by reminding us of its extraordinary power to provoke and disturb.”                 Telegraph

“A wonderfully fresh reworking of the Gospel stories [concerned with] extricating what is ethically beautiful and of permanent value in Jesus’s teachings from the religious institutions that fallibly mediate and self-servingly distort them…Pullman’s imaginative and highly thought-provoking innovation…is told with a self-effacing, yet incisive limpidity…[The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ is] a work of genuine discretion”deeply involved and involving, but with a great instinct for what to leave tacit.”                      Independent

“A simple, powerful, knowing little book…Like a small grenade, it will ricochet uncomfortably around the mind of any Christian believer for some time to come.”               Financial Times

“[The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ is] Pullman at his very best, limpid and economical…Pullman leaves the Christian reader with a genuine paradox to ponder… Fierce and beautiful.”            Guardian

“Told in simple, unadorned prose that is nonetheless beautifully effective, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ traces the familiar journey toward the cross and makes it fresh…Pullman’s retelling of the central story in western civilization provides a brilliant new interpretation that is also a thought-provoking reflection on the process of how stories come into existence and accrue their meanings.”           Sunday Times

British writer David Mitchell spent a lot of time in Japan, and he drew brilliantly on that country’s popular culture for his intricately structured and formally pyrotechnic first three novels. Lately he has turned to more conventional literary forms and when he returns to Japan for this latest novel, it is to the Shogunate in the year 1799. In particular, the setting is the tiny and anomalous Dutch trading outpost of Dejima – the only outside contact tolerated by the obsessively introspective Japanese. Caught up despite themselves in both domestic Japanese affairs and the global ramifications of Napoleon’s rise to power, the Dutchmen are concerned with little more than feathering their own nests; the exception is the ramrod straight but intensely likable Jacob de Zoet, an island of rectitude in a sea of corruption. Mitchell is a breathtaking writer, and the very simplicity of this beautifully-written novel only emphasises that.

“Compared with almost everything being written now, it is vertiginously ambitious – and brilliant…He can write as thrillingly about large-scale events as he can about the tiny details of the private world. Such fluent and masterful command of both domains seems the stuff of a true artist’s gifts.”       The Times

“Spectacularly accomplished and thrillingly suspenseful…it brims with rich, involving and affecting humanity.”          Sunday Times

“A masterpiece.”            Scotsman

“David Mitchell is back with a bang…superb.”         Irish Independent

“Arguably his finest…Every sentence yields glorious surprises that no one else could think up…It will doubtless earn Mitchell his fourth Man Booker nomination and, if there’s any justice, his first win.”            Sunday Telegraph

“Unquestionably a marvel – entirely original among contemporary British novels, revealing its author as, surely, the most impressive fictional mind of his generation.”             Observer

“However densely charted and richly sketched, this sumptuous imbroglio never drags…Mitchell flexes his prose virtuosity. More than before, those muscles do the heart’s work.”         Independent

 

This haunting novel is based on the life of Anders Sparrman, the Swedish naturalist who, in the second half of the eighteenth century became the last and youngest disciple of the scientist Carl Linnaeus. In his quest for new animal and plant species, Sparrman sailed to China at seventeen, joined Captain Cook on his second voyage to Antarctica and Tahiti, and made a pioneering journey on foot into the South African interior. In South Africa Sparrman witnessed the terrible cruelties of slavery, which made him a staunch abolitionist for the rest of his life.

A gunman seizes hostages a short drive from Leonard Lessing’s house. His face leaps out of the evening news – and out of Leonard’s own past . . .

Lennie Lessing is a jazzman taking a break. His glory days seem to be behind him, his body is letting him down, and rather than continue to take on the world, he relives old gigs and feeds his media addiction during solitary days at home. Increasingly estranged from his busy wife Francine, who is herself mourning the sudden absence of her only daughter, Leonard has found his own groove: suburban and safe from surprises. He could continue like this for years. Then comes the news bulletin that threatens to change everything.  Leonard has a choice to make.

Set in England, 2024, and George Bush’s Texas, 2006, this hypnotic novel wonders whether a life full of sound and fury signifies more than a life lived quietly, and asks what it truly means to love, to believe, and to be courageous.

This is an epic drama of adventure, courage, ruthlessness and passion by one of Scandinavia’s most acclaimed storytellers. In 1848, a motley crew of Danish sailors sets sail from the small island town of Marstal to fight the Germans. Not all of them return – and those who do will never be the same. Among them is the daredevil Laurids Madsen, who promptly escapes again into the anonymity of the high seas. As soon as he is old enough, his son Albert sets off in search of his missing father on a voyage that will take him to the furthest reaches of the globe and into the clutches of the most nefarious company. Bearing a mysterious shrunken head, and plagued by premonitions of bloodshed, he returns to a town increasingly run by women – among them a widow intent on liberating all men from the tyranny of the sea. From the barren rocks of Newfoundland to the lush plantations of Samoa, from the roughest bars in Tasmania, to the frozen coasts of northern Russia, We, The Drowned spans four generations, two world wars and a hundred years. Carsten Jensen conjures a wise, humorous, thrilling story of fathers and sons, of the women they love and leave behind, and of the sea’s murderous promise. This is a novel destined to take its place among the greatest seafaring literature.

“Magnificent and moving…his most ambitious and successful novel to date.”           Independent

“Vast and daring…one of the more engrossing literary voyages of recent years….rich, powerful and rewarding.”                              Financial Times

“The language is all you could hope for in a sea novel: sinewy and simple, often surprisingly beautiful.”                  The Times

Katherine Freeman is living a conventional life: married with a small child and working as a part-time teacher, she has drifted far from her former life as a dancer. Burying the nagging sense that part of her has gone missing, she navigates the world in a dream, drawn one way then another by those who depend on her. David, her ageing father, has secrets of his own. His desperate drive to raise funds for a Poetry Foundation in the Lake District covers up his sense of what is missing. Disappointed by his daughter’s abandoning of her artistic life, he has no idea how much they have in common. Then Katherine meets Stephen Jericho, a talented poet and friend of her father’s. They embark on an affair which is less about them than about passion itself, sexual passion but also an elemental connection with life. In this powerful debut, Emily Woof addresses the human need to engage. Her unique descriptive talent has the ability to make the reader look afresh at even the most familiar things. This is a brilliant novel about life’s choices: love and marriage, art and commerce, ideals and compromise.

Originally from Newcastle, Emily Woof is a well-known British actress. Her many film credits include the The Full Monty and the cult classic Velvet Goldmine. She has appeared in a variety of television dramas, including Miss Marple, and on stage in Neil Bartlett’s production of Romeo And Juliet. She is also a prolific writer of drama for stage, screen, BBC Radio 4 and Film Four; in addition to writing she has also directed and starred in a number of these productions. This is her first novel.

These 23 stories take us on a twisted fun ride into some future times and parallel universes where characters as diverse as a one-legged International Actuarial Forensics specialist, a pharmaceutical guinea pig, and a far-sighted fetus engage in their own games of the survival of the fittest. From a new short story by William Gibson in which a teen disassociated from his body haunts his neighborhood through the decades, to Douglas Coupland‘s balls-out satire of a slightly futuristic Survivor, to Sheila Heti‘s meditative romp about beleaguered physicists and Oracle of Delphi-like Blackberrys, Darwin’s Bastards is a fast-moving, thought-provoking reading extravaganza. The collection also includes original, previously unpublished fiction by Lee Henderson, Timothy Taylor, Anosh Irani, Mark Anthony Jarman, Yann Martel and others.

From recent Trillium Award-winner Pasha Malla‘s hilarious take on the apocalypse, where Prince is the only man left alive, to newcomer Matthew Trafford‘s brilliant triptych about the fallout from the cloning of Jesus Christ, Darwin’s Bastards is a fast-moving, thought-provoking reading extravaganza.

Aimee Bender gets this month’s gold star for being a genius. She conjures surreal worlds in which authentic emotion blooms brightly. In her first short story collection, The Girl With the Flammable Skirt, Aimee proves herself to be a masterful chronicler of the human condition of being alive. Her stories portray a gloriously unconventional world told in a very structured and believable voice. Her prose is clearly from the heart – filled with imagination and desire and that undercurrent of magic we are all lacking in our everyday traffic jam on De Waal Drive. Aimee Bender is the name to remember if you want to see the sunlight that make believe can bring to a page. Her first novel, An Invisible Number of My Own, is just as magical as it tell the story of a young grade two maths teacher whose obsession with numbers and wood takes her on a gentle adventure in self-discovery (and there is a love story bit).

Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim was published in 1954, and is a hilarious satire of British university life. Jim Dixon is bored by his job as a medieval history lecturer. His days are only improved by pulling faces behind the backs of his superiors as he tries desperately to survive provincial bourgeois society, an unbearable ‘girlfriend’ and petty humiliation at the hands of Professor Welch.

Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange was published in 1962 and has been controversial ever since. It tells the story of fifteen-year-old Alex – whose chief preoccupations are Beethoven’s Ninth and ultra-violence – as he and his droogs rampage though a dystopian future seeking thrills, until they come under the control of the state’s sinister apparatus.

David Lodge’s The British Museum is Falling Down was published in 1965 and is a brilliant comic satire of academia, religion and human entanglements. It tells the story of hapless, scooter-riding young research student Adam Appleby, who is trying to write his thesis but is constantly distracted – not least by the fact that, as Catholics in the 1960s, he and his wife must rely on ‘Vatican roulette’ to avoid a fourth child.

William Trevor’s The Children of Dynmouth was first published in 1976. In it we follow awkward, lonely, curious teenager Timothy Gedge as he wanders around the bland south-coast seaside town of Dynmouth. Timothy takes a prurient interest in the lives of the adults there, who only realize the sinister purpose to which he seeks to put his knowledge too late. This brilliant novel is eerily prescient as it shows a young person’s obsession with fame and his capacity for evil.

Penelope Lively’s Treasures of Time was published in 1979, and is an acutely observed study of marriage and manipulation. When the BBC want to make a documentary about acclaimed archaeologist Hugh Paxton, his widow Laura, daughter Kate and her fiancé Tom are a little nervous: digging up the past can also disturb the present…

William Boyd’s An Ice-Cream War was published in 1982, an auspicious debut by a young writer who would go on to be recognized as ‘the finest storyteller of his generation’ (Sebastain Faulks). It follows the fortunes of several wildly different characters – including an expat farmer and a young English aristocrat – as they are swept up in the fighting in German East Africa during the First World War, their lives converging amid battle, betrayal, love, comedy and tragedy.

Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor was first published in 1985. Alternating between the eighteenth century, when Nicholas Dyer, assistant to Christopher Wren, builds seven London churches that house a terrible secret, and the 1980s, when London detective Nicholas Hawksmoor is investigating a series of gruesome murders on the sites of certain old churches, Hawksmoor is a brilliant tale of darkness and shadow.

The state of the global economy affects every single one of us. With economic growth threatened by financial regulation and the East and West at competitive odds, the real solutions to global recession can only come through international co-operation. Featuring world leaders, Nobel Prize-winning economists, award-winning writers and opinion formers The Future of Money brings together the finest thinking to suggest solutions to this global predicament. The book breaks free from old ideas to provide new strategies for success by drawing on our real future strengths: collaboration and global co-operation. Contributors include FW de Klerk, John Bruton, Martin Feldstein, Norman Lamont, Stephane Garelli, Will Hutton, Vaclav Klaus, Mike Moore, Jacques Attali, Hamish McRae, Mamphela Ramphele, Fred Hu, Muhammad Yunus and many others.

Vince Cable is Deputy Leader of the Liberal Democrats in the UK, is currently Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, and is a recognized authority on the global financial crisis of 2007-2010.

Through his work for The London Speaker Bureau, Oliver Chittenden has been employed as an agent to many of the world’s most inspiring individuals for the past 10 years. He has also developed and managed the development of The London Speaker Bureau in both Belgium and France.

“An absorbing collection of reflections on the great crisis by precisely the people whose views you’d want to read.”                                        Niall Ferguson

Bessie Mundy, Alice Burnham and Margaret Lofty are three women with one thing in common. They are spinsters and are desperate to marry. Each woman meets a smooth-talking stranger who promises her a better life. She falls under his spell, and becomes his wife. But marriage soon turns into a terrifying experience.

In the dark opening months of the First World War, Britain became engrossed by the ˜Brides in the Bath’ trial. The horror of the killing fields of the Western Front was the backdrop to a murder story whose elements were of a different sort. This was evil of an everyday, insidious kind, played out in lodging houses in seaside towns, in the confines of married life, and brought to a horrendous climax in that most intimate of settings – the bathroom.

The nation turned to a young forensic pathologist, Bernard Spilsbury, to explain how it was that young women were suddenly expiring in their baths. This was the age of science. In fiction, Sherlock Holmes applied a scientific mind to solving crimes. In real-life, would Spilsbury be as infallible as the ˜great detective’?

“A riveting and beautifully written book. A high point in the annals of murder, for every necessary ingredient – callousness, ruthlessness, mystery, recklessness, boarding houses, detection, a chase, money, sex and even a bit of glamour – is present. Miss Robins has made a thumping good book out of it.”                           Sunday Telegraph

“In Jane Robins’ excellent The Magnificent Spilsbury – part-whodunit thriller, part-social history, part-biography – there’s delight in the detail.. This is a pacy page-turner underpinned by meticulous primary source research. Frankly, it’s a treat…as satisfying as a fine thriller.”                  The Scotsman

“As well as being a gripping, pacy account of a gruesome murder trial, this book is also a compelling piece of social history. An author tackling a story like this has to fight hard to avoid tipping into prurience and ghoulishness. Robins wins the fight, and shines a light on a dark age for women.”                 Independent on Sunday

In his first venture into non-fiction, celebrated novelist Rupert Thomson has produced an most extraordinary and unforgettable memoir. On a warm, sunny day in July 1964, Thomson returned home from school to discover that his mother had died suddenly while playing tennis. Twenty years later, Thomson and his brothers get word that their father, who suffered chronic lung damage during the war, has died alone in hospital. In an attempt to come to terms both with their own loss and with their parents’ legacies, the three brothers move back into their father’s house. The time they spend in this decadent, anarchic commune leads to a rift between Thomson and his youngest brother, a rift that will not be addressed for more than two decades. This Party’s Got to Stop works Thomson’s memories into a powerful mosaic that reveals the fragility of family life in graphic and often heartbreaking detail. It is both a love letter to a lost brother and a chronicle of the murderousness and longing that can characterise blood relationships.

A lavishly produced and beautifully illustrated volume on Akira Kurosawa, timed for the centennial of his birth. Kurosawa is arguably the greatest of all Japanese film directors and is respected around the world as one of the masters of the art form. This is the first illustrated book to pay tribute to his unmistakable style – with more than two hundred images, many never before published. The filmmaker was famous for his attention to detail, and fans will delight in seeing annotated script pages, sketches, and storyboards that reveal the meticulous craft behind Kurosawa’s genius. Peter Cowie examines how Kurosawa took the samurai genre to its apogee in such films as Yojimbo and Seven Samurai; his literary influences in such films as Throne of Blood [Macbeth] and Ran [King Lear]; and in his take on our relationship to the modern world in such films as High and Low and Dreams.

“Akira Kurosawa is one of the greatest directors ever to work in the cinema. His films meant an enormous amount to me when I was starting my own career, and it’s fitting that in the year of his centennial this book by Peter Cowie should pay tribute to him.”            Francis Ford Coppola

Through many decades of groundbreaking journalism, John Simpson has become one of the most recognisable and trusted of British journalists. With his new book he turns his eye to how Great Britain has been transformed by its free press across the years. He shows how, despite the professed independence of the press, they hold power over many of the events they report and have at times exercised it irresponsibly. He examines how the press has developed and the influence it has had over the course of the last hundred years, from the creation of the Daily Mail and the first stoking of anti-German sentiment in the years leading up to the First World War, to the Sun’s propping up of first the Thatcher and then the Blair government. In this in-depth analysis of his own trade, Simpson explores whether the press can ever be truly free and independent, and whether we would even want it to be.

“A fascinating history of the 20th century seen from the peculiar vantage point of the hassled hack, rushing to file his copy, hemmed in by censors, his own prejudices, and the demands of his proprietor and editor…Simpson is alive to the absurdities of our calling, but this is a profoundly serious book, an attempt to work out why some [reporters] stand apart.”                The Times

“Unreliable Sources is a lively and refreshing partisan account…what raises Simpson above his peers [is] a courage, a literacy and an intelligence that places him in the tradition of those he reveres, like Gellhorn herself. That’s why his conclusion is especially gratifying. “Of all the newspapers in this study, The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph probably come out of it best“.”        Nicholas Shakespeare, Daily Telegraph

From the bestselling and prizewinning author of 1599, an investigation of one of the most contentious issues in English history: who did write Shakespeare’s plays? And why does it matter so much to us? For two hundred years after Shakespeare’s death, no one thought to argue that somebody else had written his plays. Since then dozens of rival candidates – including Sir Francis Bacon and the Earl of Oxford – have been proposed as their true author. Contested Will unravels the mystery of when and why so many people began to question whether Shakespeare wrote the plays, among them such leading writers and artists as Sigmund Freud, Henry James, Mark Twain, Helen Keller, Orson Welles and Sir Derek Jacobi. Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro’s fascinating search for the source of this controversy retraces a path strewn with fabricated documents, calls for trials, false claimants, concealed identity, bald-faced deception and a failure to grasp what could not be imagined. If Contested Will does not end the authorship question once and for all, it will nonetheless irrevocably change the nature of the debate by confronting what is really contested: are the plays and poems of Shakespeare autobiographical and, if so, do they hold the key to the question of who wrote them?

“I devoured this book. Shapiro guides us through this strange history with a beguiling mixture of scepticism and sympathy. Packed with many fine pen-portraits, it’s a timely contribution to a vexed debate.”                       Simon Russell Beale

“Shapiro’s book is…authoritative, lucid and devastatingly funny, and its brief concluding statement of the case for Shakespeare is masterly.”                   Peter Carey, Sunday Times

“Unlike most other books on the subject…it is a pleasure to read. Like its splendid predecessor, it is briskly paced, cleverly detailed, elegantly argued, and never forgets that for all the complexities and quiddities of the material, the writing of history is essentially the telling of a story (or in this case, the story of a story).”   Charles Nicholl, Times Literary Supplement

Conspirator is the compelling story of Lenin’s exile: the years in which he and his political collaborators plotted a revolution that would change 20th century history. It tells the story of Lenin in the long and difficult years leading up to the Russian Revolution, years that were spent constantly on the move in and around Europe in the company of his loyal and longsuffering wife Nadezhda Krupskaya. Conspirator strips away the arid politics of Lenin’s official life and reveals the real man, as well as describing his many conflicts, personal and political, with those who shared his exile. It also looks at the loyal circle of women who unquestioningly supported Lenin, at Russian emigre lives in the enclaves of the cities in they lived and the risks taken in support of Lenin’s vision by the wider network of Russian revolutionaries in the underground movement, both at home and abroad.

“Vivid…Lenin’s ruthless determination to seize power in October 1917 probably owed much to his awareness that he had but one chance to escape the world of paranoia and conspiracy in which he had operated for so long, and that Rappaport evokes so successfully.”          Sunday Times

“In [this] vivid account, we finally have a worthy couterpart to Montefiore’s Young Stalin.”          New Statesman

A Visual History of Cookery provides a selective documentation and a stunning graphic account of the history of western cookery and its influences. Covering the diverse culinary histories of England, France, Italy, Spain and the United States, the book explores the origins of each country’s cuisine through to the present day. Illustrated with an exciting array of historical and contemporary images, from an extensive catalogue of books, paintings and photography, the book is a vibrant visual catalogue that explores the history of cookery in all its aspects. Using images from the earliest surviving cookery books, to the publications of famous cooking personalities or recent times – including Larousse Gastronomique and Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management - A Visual History of Cookery offers a regional and cultural discussion of cookery that is global in scope, assessing the role of food in modern phenomena such as nouvelle cuisine and convenience dining, as well as the impact of fast food in our society. With text by Elisabeth David, Anthony Bourdain and the famed chef Ferran Adriá of Spain’s El Bulli restaurant, A Visual History of Cookery is a beautiful, engaging book that is sure to whet the appetite of food and cookery fans alike.

All human cultures seem to make music – today and through history. But why they do so, why music can excite deep passions, and how we make sense of musical sound at all are questions that have, until recently, remained profoundly mysterious. Now, in The Music Instinct, Philip Ball provides the first comprehensive, accessible survey of what is known – and what is still unknown – about how music works its magic, and why, as much as eating and sleeping, it seems indispensable to humanity. Even while listening to apparently the simplest of tunes, the brain is performing some astonishing gymnastics: finding patterns and regularities, forming interpretations and expectations that create a sense of aesthetic pleasure. Without demanding any specialist knowledge of music or science, The Music Instinct explores how the latest research in music psychology and brain science is piecing together the puzzle of how our minds understand and respond to music. Ranging from Bach fugues to Javanese gamelan, from nursery rhymes to heavy rock, Philip Ball interweaves philosophy, mathematics, history and neurology to reveal why music moves us in so many ways. The Music Instinct also offers a passionate plea for the importance of music in education and in everyday life, arguing that, whether we know it or not, we can all claim to be musical experts.

Do you want to contribute to the wellbeing of the wider Cape Town community? Would you like to find out more about how you can help to meet the diverse needs and challenges? Do you want to get involved and make a difference? If so – this is the book for you.

How 2 Help Cape Town: Guide to Worthwhile Causes explores some of the wonderful voluntary organisations and projects in the Cape Town highlighting their needs and how you can get involved.

The purpose of How 2 Help (h2h) is to contribute to the sustainability and growth of voluntary projects that improve the lives, opportunities and environment of people living in disadvantaged circumstances. By providing a practical resource for individuals who want to be involved in community and personal transformation, the books aim to connect new resources, funding, skills and time to where these are most needed.

The h2h guides focus on smaller, more organic initiatives, in order to raise the profile of the hundreds of exciting grassroots development projects that are being driven by inspirational people and achieving brilliant things, but which are often virtually unknown beyond their immediate community. In this way the books enable the net to be thrown a little wider and help to make it easier for really worthwhile and deserving causes to gain access to sustainable support.

So we’re all counting down to the greatest sporting event on the planet, and the excitement is building and building. To while away the last few days till kick-off, and to make you the best-informed pundit in town we’ve put together a small selection of the very best, must-have football literature, to guide you through the tournament. Impress your friends with your superior knowledge and insight, and make sure your kids are the most footie-wise in their school!

First up, a locally produced book of extraordinary photographs of football as it is seen and played in Africa – on the streets, in the townships – Amen: Grassroots Football pays homage to Africa. It is a tribute to the forgotten, to the majority, to all those in the shadow of this World Cup. In Africa, football is NOT a religion. But it is everything a religion SHOULD be.

To get an insight in to the murky world of FIFA, you have to read Foul: The Secret World of FIFA – Bribes, Vote Rigging and Ticket Scandals by Andrew Jennings, award-winning investigative sports reporter – the explosive and damning exposé of the officials that run football’s world governing body. Jennings shows how FIFA President Sepp Blatter and his associates have misappropriated their position at the head of the world game in their desire for power, control, and a lucrative pay-off. How did these bizarre characters manage to take such control? He brings the strange history of FIFA up to date with new disclosures about how Germany won the contest to stage the 2006 World Cup and the inside story on the dirty battle to host 2010.

To polish up your football punditry, try Why England Lose – football’s answer to Freakonomics and The Tipping Point. The book answers the questions and topics pondered by all football fans – ˜Are Penalties Cosmicly Unfair? Or Only if You Are Nicolas Anelka?’; ˜Are Manchester United Really a Problem?’; ˜Why Hosting World Cups is Good For You’; ˜Why Poor Countries are Poor at Sport’; ˜The Country That Loves Football Most’; ˜Are Football Fans Polygamists?’ – and many more. Why England Lose (published in the US as Soccernomics) is about looking at data in new ways. It’s about revealing counterintuitive truths about football and the reader will come out of it with a better understanding not just of football, but of how economists think and what they know.

For your coffee table there is The Complete Encyclopedia of Football – a lavish celebration of the Beautiful Game. It describes the history and development of the sport, its legendary players and clubs, notable coaches and stadia. There is in-depth information on the major competitions at both national and club levels as well as sections on the laws, tactics and equipment as they have evolved over the past 130-odd years.

Also very easy on the eye is the book of South African Football Fashion Soccer Chic. From customised mining helmets to commemorative scarves, fan chants to vuvuzelas, hooters to drums – every soccer-loving country has its own football culture, with its own endless variety of ways to proudly show support for your team.

And don’t forget the kids – Football: The Ultimate Guide has everything every young fan wants to know about football, and has a really cool fabric football shirt as its cover. From the tactics, the teams and the triumphs, to the

Something Different

The Black Book of Colors

by Menena Cottin and Rosana Faria

A funny thing happened on the way to the publishers…

The Mistress’s Dog (Short Stories 1996 – 2010)

by David Medalie

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