The plan is simple: Nina will drive a car full of explosives to the site of a presidential appearance, and Thomas will pick her up. But as disaster follows upon disaster, Thomas finds himself alone and on the run, heading for a thrilling conclusion.

    Ruark's tales of African hunting not only explore the animals and their habits, but also why people hunt dangerous game.

    It reflects the author's fascination with Africa's people and their history as well as her identification with individuals and their conflicting emotions. Let me tell a story now ... --Oranges and lemons --Snowball --Sorrow food --Chibuku beer and independence --Village people --The old woman --Summer sun --The green tree --Tao --The woman from America --Chief Sekoto holds court --Property --A power struggle --A period of darkness --The Lovers --The General --Son of the soil --The prisoner who wore glasses --The coming of the Christ-child --Dreamer and storyteller.

    This powerful collection of short stories, set in her native Southern Africa, reveals her outstanding ability to pierce the core of the human condition of those, both black and white, living in countries where repression and coercion is the norm.Although Gordimer illustrates vividly the subtleties of her characters' emotions, there is always the awareness of the larger canvas, the turmoil of a violent world outside the individual incidents, where the instability of fear and uncertainty lead unwittingly to crimes of conscience.

    In "Some Are Born to Sweet Delight, " a girl's innocent love for an enigmatic foreign lodger in her parents' home leads her to involve others in a tragedy of international terrorism. "The Moment Before the Gun Went Off" reveals the strange mystery behind an accident in which a white farmer has killed a black boy. "Once Upon a Time" is a horrifying fairy tale about a child raised in a society founded on fear.

    

    Bosman was then billed as a laughter-raiser of a thoroughly individual cast who would not be shamed by comparison with the finest humorists in the English language, and the book was described as beautiful and delicious. So it has proved, through numerous reprintings since then. The enduringly funny A Cask of Jerepigo has become a South African favourite, with pieces like A Visit to Shanty Town, Johannesburg Riots, Street Processions and Jam Session frequently reprinted and performed. The satirical sharpness and unique comic reporting of South Africa’s jaunty man about town are still unmatched. The running order here follows the dates of first publication so that readers may relish Bosman’s themes and ideas as he allowed them to unfold. Each piece is edited anew from an original source and complete. With a new introduction and notes on the texts.

    By the turn of this century they had completely disappeared, destroyed finally by the murderous European settlement of the interior. Song of the Broken String has its provenance in the oral tradition of this ancient culture. In the 1860s, a German linguist named W. H. Bleek become aware of the genocide in progress. Taking into his service three /Xam Bushmen he found working as convict laborers in a chain gang, he set about preserving a small part of their heritage. After devising a phonetic notation of the /Xam's language, he transcribed the personal narratives, songs, and folktales of these three men and translated them into English. Housed in an archive at the University of Cape Town, the 12,000 pages of the Bleek and Lloyd Collection are all that remains of this people and their language. Stephen Watson, a contemporary South African poet, has explored this archive, "re-translating" Bleek's word-for-word English prose into poems in which something of the power of those original voices lives on, however filtered through the 19th century ethnographer and the 20th century writer. The results not only offer a path into a powerful oral tradition, but also raise questions about the ways in which we listen to and "translate" cultures that are distant or lost. Song of the Broken String does not bring back the /Xam, it is not a collection of artifacts. Something survives here that is almost monumental, certainly beautiful.