Peter Meyer grew up on an African game reserve. His idyllic childhood was spent running wild in the bush with Zulu friends and other free spirits. His adventures in the wilderness honed his character, nurtured by an inspirational father who taught him to believe that everything is possible. Before he had turned eight he had survived Rhino attacks, close encounters with Buffalo and Wildebeest — and the terror of twice being bitten by snakes. His pets were a baby Elephant, Warthogs and an Ostrich that frequented his backyard. He lived in a world where beauty was tempered by daily struggles for survival. He discovered that the reality of the bush is often heart-breaking, such as when an Nyala doe that he had hand-reared was taken by predators. He learned through first-hand experience that the cycle of life on Africa’s feral outbacks can be as unforgiving as it is magnificent. These were the key lessons from the wilds of Africa that he took with him when his family left the continent; from school days in England where his tough upbringing resulted in being a top sportsman, to studying at an exclusive Swiss hotel school and becoming one of the youngest directors in the Hilton group, managing exotic resorts in Jamaica and the Middle East. He was on top of the world when everything came crashing down due to tragedy. Drawing on resilience learned in the African bush, he started to rebuild his life, becoming an actor and model, clawing his way up in one of the most critically demanding industries in the world. This is an inspiring true story of living the dream — a dream nurtured by the freedom and self-reliance of growing up wild in Africa.

    Beautifully rendered, this is a world and a time never before dealt with in fiction-a period when powerful colonizers took over the lands of Hottentot tribes, exposing aborigines for the first time to Western eyes and Western ways. Through the life stories of seven men-all involved with and defined in one way or another by Pieternella, the beautiful daughter of the first mixed marriage of the new colony-we gain an understanding of the vast historical forces at work.Teeming with characters, rich with lived experience, gripping in its unexpected turns, Islands is a story of greed, power, war, courage, and international intrigue, at once a meticulously researched portrait of the age, and a great adventure story.

    His charming, humane, and side-splitting stories brought the trials and triumphs of Dave, Morley, Sam, and Stephanie to life, and made their memorable circle of friends, family, and neighbours as real as our own.This collection is both timely and timeless, a rich celebration of Stuart McLean's inimitable voice, and of the importance of love, community, kindness, and the healing power of laughter.

    When Nolitye finds a magical stone on the dusty streets of Phola, her granny's words take on a new meaning. Along with her two friends - the somewhat pampered Bheki, and Four Eyes, a reformed member of the Spoilers gang led by Rotten Nellie - Nolitye puts the powers of the stone to good use: for the first time the threesome can stand up to the Spoilers; Nolitye can save the life of Rex, the leader of a pack of talking township mutts; and dare to look scary MaMtonga with her living brown-and-green snake necklace in the eye. But soon Nolitye finds out that the purplish-blue magic stone is but five stones needed to put right things that started to go wrong the day her father died in a mining accident when she was five years old. Or so she was told by her mother... By merging a cast of characters straight out of African myth folklore with everyday township life, K. Sello Duiker created a magical world and a truly wondrous quest, a timeless tale that will appeal to an ageless audience.

    This novel links Hillbrow, rural Tiragalong and Oxford, and contains the shattered dreams of youth, sexuality and its unpredictable costs, AIDS, xenophobia, suicide, the omnipotent violence that cuts short the promise of young people, and the Africanist understanding of the life.

    A little boy witnesses the ugliness of apartheid.

    Peter Allison gives us the guide’s-eye view of living in the bush, confronting the world’s fiercest terrain of wild animals and, most challenging of all, managing herds of gaping tourists. Passionate for the animals of the Kalahari, Allison works as a top safari guide in the wildlife-rich Okavango Delta. As he serves the whims of his wealthy clients, he often has to stop the impulse to run as far away from them as he can, as these tourists are sometimes more dangerous than a pride of lions. No one could make up these outrageous-but-true tales: the young woman who rejected the recommended safari-friendly khaki to wear a more “fashionable” hot pink ensemble; the lost tourist who happened to be drunk, half-naked, and a member of the British royal family; establishing a real friendship with the continent’s most vicious animal; the Japanese tourist who requested a repeat performance of Allison’s being charged by a lion so he could videotape it; and spending a crazy night in the wild after blowing a tire on a tour bus, revealing that Allison has as much good-natured scorn for himself. The author’s humor is exceeded only by his love and respect for the animals, and his goal is to limit any negative exposure to humans by planning trips that are minimally invasive—unfortunately it doesn’t always work out that way! Peter Allison is originally from Sydney, Australia. His safaris have been featured in National Geographic, Conde Nast Traveler, and on television programs such as Jack Hanna's Animal Adventures. He travels frequently to speaking appearances, and splits most of his time between Botswana, Sydney, and San Francisco.

    The year is 1794, it is the age of enlightenment, and on Vogelzang the master is conducting strange experiments in human breeding and classification. It is also here that Trijn falls in love.Two hundred years later and a thousand miles away, Sister Vergilius, a nun at a mission hospital, wants to free herself from an austere order. It is 1961 and her life intertwines with that of a gentleman farmer – an Englishman and suspected Communist – who collects and studies insects and lives a solitary life. While a group of Americans arrive in a cavalcade of caravans and a new republic is about to be born, desire is unfurling slowly.In Claire Robertson’s majestic debut novel, two stories echo across centuries to expose that which binds us and sets us free.About the author:Claire Robertson lives in Simon’s Town. She has spent the past 30 years as a journalist, reporting from South Africa, the US and USSR. She has worked in newspapers, magazines, radio and television, and now works as a senior copy editor on the Sunday Times. She has won awards for her reporting and her work is carried in several anthologies.

    With exquisite prose, formal innovation, and a masterful command of storytelling, Ntshanga illustrates how some young people navigated the dusk that followed the dawn of freedom in South Africa and humanizes the casualties of the Mbeki government's fatal policies on HIV & AIDS."—Naomi Jackson, Poets & Writers"Woozy, touching... a novel that delivers an unexpected love letter to Cape Town, painting it as a place of frustrated glory. The Reactive often teems with a beauty that seems to carry on in front of its glue-huffing wasters despite themselves."—Marian Ryan, Slate"With The Reactive, [Ntshanga] has created an immersive and powerful portrait of drug use, community, and health issues by exploring what it was like to be young, black, South African, and HIV positive in the early aughts."—VICE"[The Reactive] is an affecting, slow-burning novel that gives a fantastic sense of a particular place and time, and of the haunted inner life of its protagonist."—Tobias Carroll, Star-Tribune (Minneapolis)"This novel about an HIV+ man who mourns the death of his brother in Cape Town is shaping up to be one of the best debuts of 2016."—Flavorwire"Sharp and affecting... [Ntshanga] directs the story with an amazing precision of language that few writers can achieve in a lifetime of work. With a style all his own, Ntshanga animates despair and agitation in a collage of moments, memories and landscapes that speak volumes of a exigent moment in South African history."—Alibi"Gritty and revealing, Ntshanga's debut novel offers a brazen portrait of present-day South Africa. This is an eye-opening, ambitious novel."—Publishers Weekly"Ntshanga offers a devastating story yet tells it with noteworthy glow and flow that keeps pages turning until the glimmer-of-hope ending."—Library JournalFrom the winner of the PEN International New Voices Award comes the story of Lindanathi, a young HIV+ man grappling with the death of his brother, for which he feels unduly responsible. He and his friends—Cecelia and Ruan—work low-paying jobs and sell anti-retroviral drugs (during the period in South Africa before ARVs became broadly distributed). In between, they huff glue, drift through parties, and traverse the streets of Cape Town where they observe the grave material disparities of their country.A mysterious masked man appears seeking to buy their surplus of ARVs, an offer that would present the friends with the opportunity to escape their environs, while at the same time forcing Lindanathi to confront his path, and finally, his past.With brilliant, shimmering prose, Ntshanga has delivered a redemptive, ambitious, and unforgettable first novel.Masande Ntshanga is the winner of the inaugural PEN International New Voices Award in 2013, and a finalist for the Caine Prize in 2015. He was born in East London in 1986 and graduated with a degree in Film and Media and an Honours degree in English Studies from UCT, where he became a creative writing fellow, completing his Masters in Creative Writing under the Mellon Mays Foundation. He received a Fulbright Award, an NRF Freestanding Masters scholarship, a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship and a Bundanon Trust Award. His work has appeared in The White Review, Chimurenga, VICE and n + 1. He has also written for Rolling Stone magazine.

    Along with his candid expose of the problems, he poses some suggestions about what needs to be done to break the stranglehold of the African elites on political power and to set sub-Saharan Africa once more on the road to development.

    She documents her early days in the Democratic Party and the Democratic Alliance, at a time when the party was locked in a no-holds-barred factional conflict. And she chronicles the intense political battles to become mayor of Cape Town, leader of the DA and premier of the Western Cape, in the face of dirty tricks from the ANC and infighting within her own party.This is a story about political intrigue and treachery, floor-crossing and unlikely coalitions, phone tapping and intimidation, false criminal charges and judicial commissions. It documents Zille’s courageous fight against corruption and state capture and her efforts to realign politics and entrench accountability. And it describes a mother’s battle to raise children in the pressured world of South African politics.This book is as frank, honest and unflinching as Helen Zille herself, and will appeal to anyone interested in the story of South African politics over the past fifty years.

    The first of the great South African novels chronicles the adventures of three childhood friends who defy societal repression. The novel's unorthodox views on religion and marriage aroused widespread controversy upon its 1883 publication, and the work retains in power more than a century later. We are delighted to publish this classic book as part of our extensive Classic Library collection. Many of the books in our collection have been out of print for decades, and therefore have not been accessible to the general public. The aim of our publishing program is to facilitate rapid access to this vast reservoir of literature, and our view is that this is a significant literary work, which deserves to be brought back into print after many decades. The contents of the vast majority of titles in the Classic Library have been scanned from the original works. To ensure a high quality product, each title has been meticulously hand curated by our staff. Our philosophy has been guided by a desire to provide the reader with a book that is as close as possible to ownership of the original work. We hope that you will enjoy this wonderful classic work, and that for you it becomes an enriching experience.

    

    Meet the man who vacuums bewildered prairie dogs out of their burrows; a frustrated werewolf who roams the streets of Soho getting mistaken for Brian Blessed; a smug carbon-neutral eco-couple; a teenage girl who invites 45,000 MySpace friends to a house party; the author of a business book entitled Highly Successful Secrets to Standing on a Corner Holding Up a Golf Sale Sign and a man whose attempts to teach softball to a group of indolent British advertising executives sparks an international crisis.

    As she struggles to communicate with her maidservant turned caretaker, Agaat, the complicated history of their relationship is revealed.Life for white farmers in 1950s South Africa was full of promise. Young and newly married, Milla carved her own farm out of a swathe of Cape mountainside. She earned the respect of the male farmers in her community and raised a son. But forty years later all she has left are memories and the proud, contrary Agaat. With punishing precision, yet infinite tenderness, Agaat performs her duties, balancing anger with loyalty. As Milla’s white world and its certainties recede and Agaat faces the prospect of freedom, the shift of power between them mirrors the historic changes happening around them. Marlene van Niekerk’s epic masterpiece portrays how two women—and, perhaps, a nation—can forge a path toward understanding and reconciliation.