Umuzi Random House Struik imprint: 59 books

“I've been craving the road for some time,” writes Justin Fox – odd words for this most seasoned of travel writers. But there is more to it: “Restless, anxious about an uneventful slide into my late 30s ...” And thus begins ten thousand kilometres around the edge of the Republic. Hugging...

“They sit in the doors of the Big Mamma Pumas, feet dangling out, all gung ho. Sometimes you have a bad hair day in the big fat sky – come back with holes in you.” First nothing happens, on the border between Namibia and Angola, 1983. A platoon of servicemen at a remote outpost kill time smoking,...

“Someone has to pay.” Jeremy Hlungwani has a gun and an unquenchable violent thought has lodged in his mind. Today he will drive his luxury car from his big-shot job and life in the suburbs to his childhood home in Meadowlands, Soweto. Along the way he will recall the moments in his life that...

Since the publication of his debut volume, Inside, which was awarded the 1984 Ingrid Jonker Prize, Jeremy Cronin has always, compellingly, managed to combine political conviction with poetic clarity. In the words of Ingrid de Kok, Cronin is "our most experimental, demanding and, despite his disclaimers,...

Luck matters. Life is chancy. Springbok legend, war hero, thriving businessman - that was JJ Kitchen, known to all as Kitchen Boy. His was a life as large as a sports stadium, as thrilling as baling out of a burning war plane. Now he lies dead in his coffin in a Durban cathedral and his life is relived...

When the caravan of the Mobile Church of the Holistic Christ rolls into a sleepy town on a hot spring day, all hell breaks loose. Dominee Donges, undisputed moral authority of Nylsdorp, faces a direct challenge from the charismatic Reverend Grant, with his fire-and-brimstone sermons and his miracle...

“You are too close to the water,” Paul whispered. “There are barbels in the mud. They will wake up if you step on them.” When Paul and Dominique are sent to boarding schools in Natal, their idyllic childhood on a Free State farm is over. Their parents’ leftist politics has made life impossible...

‘Taut, sensual, funny and full of bodily intelligence. Are you there? Is it only me? these poems ask – as they look you in the eye.’ – Sarah Nuttall. The poems in Bodyhood open widely to the inside while looking outwards at the connecting points of body and being – in love, in feeling, in...

Eleven-year-old Nolitye's granny used to say: if you mess with a woman, you mess with a stone. 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 friend - the somewhat pampered Bheki, and Four Eyes, a reformed member of the...

Enslin Kruger is a dying man, but he is the top prisoner in C-Max prison, and must name his successor. This means blood. Kruger sees an unexpected opportunity to achieve this and at the same time exact revenge on his old nemesis, Yudel Gordon. He will anoint as his heir the man who slaughters Gordon’s...

Salena, the elder of two Cape sisters, is light-skinned and demure, an easy one to marry off to a husband of her parents’ choosing. Zuhra is dark and wilful, refusing tradition and leaving the country in pursuit of her own destiny. 'The shoots of their lives grow apart and interlace again. Salena...

Former Brigadier Piet Byleveld is recognised worldwide as one of the best detectives of our time. If you commit murder and Piet Byl is called in, your place in jail is booked. If you harmed children anf he's on your case, you’ve sealed your own fate. And if you’re a serial killer on the loose,...

From the beginniong Fine Lines from the Box traces a journey of the mind and an ongoing exercise of reading and writing by one of South Africa's most incisive commentators. Taken with Njabulo Ndebele's earlier Rediscovery of the Ordinary, this collection challenges, entreats, cajoles and prods one...

Pat Fahrenfort knows about hard work. Her background meant factory floors from age fifteen in a country where jobs were still advertised for “Fair-Skinned Coloureds”. But young Pat had other plans. Whether she was in overalls gluing spines to books in an assembly line, or in high heels dancing...