Umuzi imprint: 97 books

And now for something completely different on the South African book scene: a slapstick Jewish comedy set in the Joburg northern suburbs. GP Dr Koekentapp is called to the Levy home to attend to a Mr Levy's kidney stone. Mrs Levy sets her eyes on the young doctor, spots the perfect marriage material...

It is the Swinging Sixties. Rex Duval arrives in Cape Town to teach English Literature at the university. Freshly promoted from Oxford, debonair and dashing, he takes Cape academia and society by storm. In his wake come Milla and Gladys, luscious twin sisters in search of the good life. Gladys lands...

Left to rot in an Iranian prison and under the shadow of death, Kamaal tells fellow-insurgent Drew the story of the four drunk beauties – Elvira the housekeeper and ex-assassin, Lou the Senegalese sculptor, virtuoso cellist Mimi, and Adriette, a food fundi from the Free State. The two men follow...

Joanna Renfield’s life at The Fish Hoek Valley Museum of Natural History gets complicated when DNA testing links the museum’s only claim to fame – a twelve thousand-year-old skeleton nicknamed Fish Hoek Man – with Saartjie Baartman. The media goes wild, the museum has a makeover, and Joanna...

Slipping down a rabbit hole at a costume party like Alice, feeling zero gravity like a spaceman kissing a fellow alien, or drawing blood in the library ... These short stories portray a reality that is often brutal, and probe the notion of personal responsibility – when should you intervene? Here...

First there is the killing of the minister of energy. Then the cop investigating the murder commits suicide. Fearing a conspiracy, the minister’s lover hires pi Fish Pescado to find the killer. Then she goes missing. And Fish is being stonewalled by the cops because … … in the dark shadows of...

What happens to Chris and Ruthie comes naturally to teenagers: they fall in love, obsessively. But it isn’t natural that their love can only survive in secrecy, being against the wishes, even beyond the imagination, of their parents. And above all being illegal. At home Chris half loves, half fears...

In the raging metropolis of Meyerton, a small group of South Africans cluster around a B&B, splashing in the deep end of the new South Africa. May used to be maid, but now she’s in business with her former madam, Annica. Together they run the Fox ? Zulu where its riotous guests have to learn...

‘Did Mandela work for nothing?’ ‘Mr Sushi comes to town’ ‘Give me a corrupt black any day’ These are just some of Eric Miyeni’s newspaper columns and opinion pieces, which have earned him friends and enemies alike. Known for his straight-talking frankness, his views on subjects ranging...

Esther Gelderblom has been waiting for a house for twenty years. In the bitter Oudtshoorn winter she and her friend Katjie queue to ask when their names will finally appear on the government’s list of housing recipients. Esther dreams of a home for her daughter Liedjie, who plays the keyboard for...

Katrijn van der Caab, freed slave and wigmaker’s apprentice, travels with her eccentric employer from Cape Town to Vogelzang, a remote farm where a hairless girl needs their services. The year is 1794, it is the age of enlightenment, and on Vogelzang the master is conducting strange experiments...

After years of illness, eleven-year-old Emily receives the heart of a seventeen-year-old boy who has died in a motor-bike accident. But the organ comes with an attachment:the boy who had it first is still hanging around. From'up there' he watches as she recovers - sometimes exasperated, other times...

It is the 1960s in South Africa and the new prime minister has his head full of plans. He consults a powerful witchdoctor, but once he begins his scheme for cutting up the land he loses the sangoma’s protection. In the meantime the family butler has himself reclassified so he can marry the Coloured...

Arriving at a highway accident scene on a stormy night, Joburg paramedic Nick Kenyon finds only one victim: a critically injured young woman in the car’s passenger seat. In the ambulance, Nick agrees to take her phone and make an urgent call for her. What he doesn’t know is that the missing driver...