She has carefully built an exemplary life. But all of this is threatened when a comrade from the seventies shows up. Over the next week Doreen's past rushes in as she is forced to admit to her family and herself the actions that caused her to change her name and identity three decades earlier.In 1970 she was impressionable and idealistic Lucy Johansson. When her brother, Adam, came home from Vietnam damaged and bitter, they moved to California, where she raged against the war and the Establishment with many others of her generation. She joined an antiwar group and participated in increasingly militant protests designed to bring attention to their cause and to change the world for the better. But all the best intentions and careful planning couldn't keep things from going terribly wrong.Told from a twenty-first-century perspective, She Was spans the width of the American continent and the depth of social upheaval of the second half of the twentieth century. She Was explores the violent, determining act in one woman's life that mirrors the formative trauma of her age. She Was is a story about the indelible nature of the past, about hiding in the ordinary, and, ultimately, about making amends.

    As they grapple with the sudden loss of their darling boy, they embark on a painful and moving journey of immense power which changes their lives forever and shatters the fragile ecosystem of their once ordered family. Ajie, the youngest sibling, is burdened with the guilt of having seen Paul last and convinced that his vanished brother was betrayed long ago. But his search for the truth uncovers hidden family secrets and reawakens old, long forgotten ghosts as rumours of police brutality, oil shortages, and frenzied student protests serve as a backdrop to his pursuit.In a tale that moves seamlessly back and forth through time, Ajie relives a trip to the family's ancestral village where, together, he and his family listen to the myths of how their people settled there, while the villagers argue over the mysterious Company, who found oil on their land and will do anything to guarantee support. As the story builds towards its stunning conclusion, it becomes clear that only once past and present come to a crossroads will Ajie and his family finally find the answers they have been searching for.And After Many Days introduces Ile's spellbinding ability to tightly weave together personal and political loss until, inevitably, the two threads become nearly indistinguishable. It is a masterful story of childhood, of the delicate, complex balance between the powerful and the powerless, and a searing portrait of a community as the old order gives way to the new.

    In spite of her own despair, she is determined to protect her brother Tom and her baby son Georgie from Jacob's bullying ways - for she is all they have in the world. But when Jacob hires villainous Salter and his vile wife Sal to run the barge, Effie's life becomes even more unbearable, and Tom is sent packing without a penny to his name. Forced to live on deck with little to shelter her and Georgie from the elements, tormented by the Salters, Effie is driven to desperation. And stealing Jacob's hidden cache of money she escapes with her son. As she begins her frantic search for Tom, Effie vows that whatever happens she will make a home for little Georgie and keep him safe from harm.

    As he strives to establish himself, he becomes closely involved with the fluid and dangerous politics of the newly-dependent state.

    While investigating the crime, Detective Tolya Kurchenko comes across the dead man’s diaries, written by Redmond over four decades. He hopes the diaries will lead him to the killer. In fact, they help him sort out the complexities of his own identity.Spanning 65 years and three continents—from Hitler's Europe to the decaying Soviet Empire of the 1970s, and revealing the little-known history of Sosúa, a Jewish settlement in the jungles of the Dominican Republic—A.J. Sidransky's debut novel leads us into worlds long gone, and the lives of people still touched by those memories.

    A young writer uncertain of what he wants to say, the man moves through tableaus of life in one of the most dynamic cities in the world: he hears the muezzin's call to prayer in the early morning light, and listens to John Coltrane during the late afternoon heat. He witnesses teenagers diligently perpetrating e-mail frauds from internet cafes, longs after a woman reading Michael Ondaatje on a public bus, and visits the impoverished National Museum. Along the way, he reconnects with old school friends and his family, who force him to ask himself profound questions of personal and national history. Over long, wandering days, the narrator compares present-day Lagos to the Lagos of his memory, and in doing so reveals changes that have taken place in himself.

    Taking this case as raw material for his alchemic imagination, Zakes Mda tells the story of one irrepressible fallen madonna, Niki, and her family, at the heart of the scandal.

    Germany has just declared war on France. Piet Barol, the handsome, irresistible figure of Mason's much-admired, sensuous" History of a Pleasure Seeker," is once again at the center of this ambitious, lush new novel. Barol, a European adventurer living as a poseur in South Africa's Cape Colony, navigates the turbulence and opportunities of this strange land in his blind quest for comfort and riches as thousands of black families have been turned out of their homes by a white government bent on confiscating 90% of the country for the exclusive use of Europeans.Piet and his wife have successfully, grandly lived a life for the past five years as colonials impersonating French aristocrats (the dazzling Vicomte and Vicomtesse Pierre de Barol of the Chateau de Barol on the banks of the Loire River), though in truth, he is Dutch and far from aristocratic and she is American and hardly of the railroad fortune family she so often and casually invokes. Both are wily, and both have large dreams. After years of supremely decadent living, Fortune, which has always favored Piet, has grown tired of him and the Barols' luck is about to run out. They are short of cash and on the verge of ruin.As one last grand effort they have embarked on a furniture business full of possibility. They need wood for the enterprise, and through Piet's charm and guile have come upon the source for their inventory that will make all of them rich. The wood is in a forbidden forest filled with sacred, untouchable trees of fine mahogany which Piet is sure he will be able to extract in exchange for beads and glass trickets. His pursuit of the bewitched trees of the fabled forest of Gwadana takes him deep into the Xhosa [pron. KO-sa] homelands, where unfailing charm, wit and the friendship of two black men are his only allies as he attempts an act of supreme audacity: to steal a forest from its rightful owners -- a Xhosa clan who know to be true that the spirits of their ancestors reside in their magical, ageless trees . . ."

    Everyone else know Gideon Goosen as a monster: a gangster, assassin and murderer, who made a pact with the devil and deserves to live out his days in a solitary cell in Pretoria Central. How is it possible that the son of a decorated, God-fearing security policeman could fall so low? His mother blames it on his friends from the other side of the railway line in Randfontein, others on a leggy prostitute from Nigel who became his obsession. Gideon himself believes everything changed on an autumn morning when the fatal pellets from a pump-action shotgun cut short the life of an anti-apartheid activist in the driveway of his home. Set against the backdrop of the dying days of apartheid, and inspired by a true story and events that really happened, Jacques Pauw's explosive debut novel exposes the raw, seamy underworld of gangsterism and brutality when life was cheap and fear was everywhere.

    

    Set on the mean streets of 1960s South London.MENACING…The Drapers rule the streets of South London. Everyone's afraid of them – and that's just how they like it.But when tempers flare and a family feud spirals out of control, tragedy strikes, leaving eldest son Danny in charge.MANIPULATED…But he has shocking plans for the family business and Petula, the baby of the family, becomes the scapegoat for the Draper’s dirty dealings.MISSING…Years later, and the once united family has now split up. Petula returns to the place she once called home to face her family as well as her demons, unleashing a terrible secret that could destroy them once and for all…

    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.

    Piya Roy, a young American marine biologist of Indian descent, arrives in this lush, treacherous landscape in search of a rare species of river dolphin and enlists the aid of a local fisherman and a translator. Together the three of them launch into the elaborate backwaters, drawn unawares into the powerful political undercurrents of this isolated corner of the world that exact a personal toll as fierce as the tides.

    This memorable, heartbreaking story opens in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 1974, on the eve of a revolution. Yonas kneels in his mother’s prayer room, pleading to his god for an end to the violence that has wracked his family and country. His father, Hailu, a prominent doctor, has been ordered to report to jail after helping a victim of state-sanctioned torture to die. And Dawit, Hailu’s youngest son, has joined an underground resistance movement—a choice that will lead to more upheaval and bloodshed across a ravaged Ethiopia. Beneath the Lion’s Gaze tells a gripping story of family, of the bonds of love and friendship set in a time and place that has rarely been explored in fiction. It is a story about the lengths human beings will go in pursuit of freedom and the human price of a national revolution. Emotionally gripping, poetic, and indelibly tragic, Beneath The Lion’s Gaze is a transcendent and powerful debut. .

    Through the pain of separation and poverty, Ruth was to become part of the fulfillment of prophecy—and find true love on her own doorstep—in this biblical novel.