Non-fiction Highlights

If you made me angry, to me, for that anger to go away I have to get hold of you . . . For that anger to go away, I have to do something to you.’ These are the words of one of South Africa’s most terrifying serial killers, who spoke to psychologist Brin Hodgskiss in the bowels of the country’s most secure prisons. Hodgskiss interviewed several of the most notorious serial killers and his recordings sat gathering dust until recently, when top true-crime podcaster Nicole Engelbrecht found his research online. The two connected and now they bring their love of story-telling to this highly readable book. In Killer Stories, Hodgskiss combines his interviews with the tenets of narrative psychology to take the reader into the minds of the killers and shares how his own journey as a psychologist and human being contributed to his deeper understanding of them. The book intertwines the killers’ versions of the truth and the true-crime stories behind them, re-telling their killing sprees in gripping detail. Journey with the authors as they lay out how the stories these men told themselves about their lives contributed to where they ended up – and how those stories aren’t that different from those we all tell ourselves.

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Following her bestsellers Saving a Stranger’s Life and Holding My Breath, One Call Away invites you to join Dr Anne Biccard on the front lines in the emergency department of a busy Johannesburg hospital. You’ll meet the Eye-roller, the Clothes peg, the Hairbrush and the Crackling Malaprop. Mostly though, you’ll be exhilarated as Anne and her team battle to snatch patients back from their main adversary, the Grim Reaper. Dentures and daggers, acid and aneurysms – it’s all in a day’s work for Dr Anne and the emergency team. Back home at the farm, the roller-coaster ride continues with the famous band of rescued Snoopies, long walks and reflections. One Call Away asks big questions about life while acknowledging the joy and brevity of it all.

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You only need to win a game by one point.’ – Jacques Nienaber after South Africa’s tournament opener against Scotland in the 2023 Rugby World Cup. Little did the coach know that it would take three one-point games to propel the Springboks into the history books as back-to-back winners of the Webb Ellis Cup. In 2017 the Boks looked punch-drunk as Jacques Nienaber and Rassie Erasmus watched them being overpowered by Ireland. The following year, the coaching duo took up the reins little more than 18 months before the 2019 RWC in Japan. And so began a journey that was to end in victory in the Stade de France six years later. Twice the Glory goes deep inside the Bok story of that historic era. Filled with drama, cheers and tears, it will have you on the edge of your seat as you relive each nail-biting moment. It’s all here: the Covid disruption, Siya Kolisi’s rise to the captaincy, Rassie in hot water over that video, injury blows and the emergence of new talent as they head off to France. The book also includes penetrating analysis and insights from the self-effacing Nienaber into how this team became the finest the world has seen. A recurring theme is the friendship between Jacques and Rassie that goes all the way back to their university days, and why they decided to come home to South Africa to ‘turn things around’.

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Take one over-the-top, bolshie, city-slicker Indian woman. One reticent and reserved white husband. And their three children. Add them all to a far-flung village in the South African countryside where mixed-race families are somewhat of a rarity, and you get front-row seats to a lifestyle that is both delightful and, at times, decidedly discombobulating. Told with huge dollops of that quirky, sometimes perplexing Indian lingo that is unique to South Africans of Indian origin, garnished with hilarity and introspection, The Village Indian is a journey of the self and an authentic celebration of identity, culture and food, and that confusing, chaotic thing it is to sometimes be South African. From run-ins with deadly snakes, to raising chickens, to sprinklings of small-town skullduggery, scores settling, attempted coup d’états and scamming other villagers – you will get all the tea to titillate. And in a small town, far, far away – meshugas aside – there is the magic of humanity and community. The Village Indian is a tale for all South Africans.

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We Were Always Here: Stories of Black Inventors Across the African Diaspora tells the unknown stories of the innovation and ingenuity of Africans who are solving African problems for African people. These stories include heart-rending accounts of African American inventors at the turn of the 20th century who struggled to have their inventions recognised under relentless racism, and, in the modern era, inventors from the African continent who found inspiration and answers to issues faced every day that are particular to their situations.

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Griefseed is a gift, an offering from the pen of Malika Ndlovu that seeks to transform the ways we think about and process grief. Multidisciplinary in scope, the text includes poems, personal essays, images, and reflections on grief that punctuate the life story of the poet, offered here as medicine. These creative pieces function as both window onto an individual woman’s life as she has journeyed with, through and beyond grief; as well as a mirror, inviting the reader to see their own lives and losses reflected within Ndlovu’s. This invitation to sit with grief, hold it, look it in the eye, and tend to it, is also an invocation to consider multigenerational relationships – how grief cements our relationships to the past, to ancestors, to descendants. To note where grief echoes along kinship lines, spreading itself throughout the branches of family trees. How centuries of grief from our grandmothers and grandfathers lodge themselves in our own bodies, crying out for release, relief and processing. If we dare to take up this visceral knowing, grief can transform us, becoming a generative site for renewal, rethinking, recasting.

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Evolution is a series of bets, and no animal gambles the way humans do. This has led us to unprecedented ecological dominance, via the steepest odds and unlikeliest of outcomes, but our winning streak cuts both ways: the secret to our success may yet be our downfall.The Gambling Animal offers a revelatory retelling of the human story. Drawing on their unique research into the risk psychology of humans and other animals - including our most impressive rivals, elephants - Don Ross and Glenn Harrison reveal the hidden logic of our rise.Even before the dawn of civilisation, we bet the Earth on our ability to keep doubling down. But with an ecological crisis on the horizon, how long will our winning streak continue?

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‘A meticulous and enlightening march through the history of racial pseudoscience and a deep investigation into how and why it continues to have salience to millions today. If you’re wondering where on earth the bizarre, violent alt-right ideas that spread so effectively by the alt-right came from, this book makes it clear – they were with us all along.’ – Mike Wendling, BBC journalist and author of Day of Reckoning White supremacy is on the rise in the world once again, often finding expression in acts of extreme violence by young white men. Gavin Evans explores the roots of this ideology, traced back to the 19th century to Charles Darwin and Francis Galton’s race-based theories. He examines the spread of eugenics and the rise of Nazism and Apartheid. Evans further investigates the 21st-century evolution of ‘Great Replacement’ ideas, their spread through alt-right forums, and their influence on young men with access to weapons. White Supremacy reveals the connections between mainstream and extremist ‘Replacement Theory’ and the ongoing promotion of race science by both far right and establishment figures, highlighting the dangerous legacy of eugenics.

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