Karina Author, Book, Review

Steve Kretzmann reviews ‘Everyone Dies’ by Frankie Murrey

The first review is in. The book will hit our bookshelves next week!

… It is an unsettling series of stories, as death is, and could be considered a book of poems rather than prose; rare is the paragraph that does not contain an arresting image or original turn of phrase. It is a world in which, refreshingly, expectations are not met:

“My doctor said I should watch my diet and suggested a pacemaker. I ignored him. And my son. Who I knew was hoping to one day have it out with me. I had been avoiding serious conversations with him since he started showing an interest in them at age thirteen. There would no doubt be consequences. And now, hospital-bound, tied to a bed by tubes, I can no longer escape him.” – Extract from ‘She said she was from the future’.

And yes, everyone does die, and not in a climactic Game of Thrones sense, despite the subtitle: A series. The drama here is internal, muted. Often it is not so much that someone – mostly the narrator – dies, as life having escaped, or at the very least been let go of …

Read the entire review here: The Critter
Karina Author, Book, Review

Diane Awerbuck reviews TUNNEL by Nick Mulgrew for the Sunday Times

You’ve been here before. Confinement in close quarters after a disaster not of your making sounds pretty familiar, but Nick Mulgrew’s claustrophobic new novel, Tunnel, isn’t obviously about the pandemic.

It deals instead with the fallout after some unnamed but probably nuclear events that collapse the Huguenot Tunnel and render the surrounds uninhabitable. This terrifying prospect must surely have occurred to anyone travelling in carbon-monoxided convoy through the intestines of the Du Toitskloof mountains. How does this concrete hold back the weight of the mountain? What if it all falls in? Who would come? And how long would that take? And also, crucially for this novel, would it be worth surviving?

Set in a South Africa that’s the same but different, Tunnel plays with the idea of inversion. There’s a South-West and a Caprivi, and there are workers’ compounds and bush cops and baboons — but not as we know them. The day the action takes place is March Day, and all travellers need permits. Then the world goes dark.

After the characters’ initial panic, they find their space literally shrunk and the tunnel fast becomes “the inside-outside”. Their hell descent must continue before they can eventually find their way to fresh air and the elegiac upswing of the ending …

Continue reading: Sunday Times

Karina Author, Book, Review

Joy Watson reviews ELTON BAATJIES by Lester Walbrugh

Lester Walbrugh’s ‘Elton Baatjies’ shows us the treacherous terrain of stepping into who we are

Elton Baatjies is a tour de force. It is a carefully crafted book and its temporal sense of time and location are brought to life beautifully.

Elton Baatjies is based on the story of Norman Simons who stalked and killed boys on the Cape Flats between 1986 and 1995. Dubbed “the station strangler”, Simons is thought to have been responsible for sodomising and strangling 22 boys. The evidence at the time could only link him to the death of one, 10-year-old Elroy van Rooyen. Simons was a schoolteacher, which made his arrest particularly shocking.   

Elton Baatjies is set in the Elgin Valley, about an hour’s drive from Cape Town. The story opens with Elton taking up a job as an English teacher at a local school. The community is in uproar because six boys have been raped, murdered and dumped down the side of the mountain …

Continue reading: Daily Maverick

Karina Author, Book, Review

Karen Watkins reviews The Other Me by Joy Watson

The Other Me is fast-paced, lively and with convincing characters who come, go and come again at Lolly’s bidding.

It will have you mesmerised and wanting more; to see the next mess she gets into and more importantly, how she gets out of it.

Lolly is resourceful, funny and captivating but also vulnerable, lonely and rejects violence.

Laugh at her, squeal and squirm, Lolly is a detestable character but in the best possible way.

It’s a delightful binge-worthy read.

Southern Suburbs Tatler

Read the entire review here: Southern Suburbs Tatler

Karina Author, Book, Interview, Review

Cathy Park Kelly’s memoir, Boiling a Frog Slowly, shines a light on relational trauma, writes Joy Watson

David Whyte, the author of Consolations, reminds us that to be courageous is not necessarily to go anywhere or to do anything. It is to make conscious the things we already feel deeply and then to live through the unending vulnerabilities of its consequences. To be courageous is to seat our feelings deeply in the body and in the world, to be open to the unknown that begs us on. Boiling a Frog Slowly is an effervescent narrative of what happens when we dare to open up to the unknown, to move on. 

Daily Maverick Life
Karina Author, Book, Review

Azille Coetzee reviews ‘A Hibiscus Coast’ by Nick Mulgrew for ‘Tydskrif vir letterkunde’

A Hibiscus Coast does not simplify anything, does not try to redeem nor condemn—it complicates. It shows how much we lose when we close ourselves off to that which is strange, Other and new—whether it is at home or somewhere else. Although it resists a linear path of character growth and healing for Mary (or any of the other characters) it does offer hope; hope in connection and relation, and in the expansive power of opening oneself up to that which is unknown and outside.

Tydskrif vir letterkunde
Karina Author, Book, Review

AN ISLAND by Karen Jennings published by Hogarth Books in the US

Happy US publication day to An Island by Karen Jennings!

The book arrives with great reviews:

“No plot summary can do justice to a story woven this carefully, whose strength lies in its deliberate pacing and sharp dispensation of detail. Samuel is as real as a shaking hand.”

New York Times

“Much of the story reads like an allegory, but Jennings, despite her insight, never implies that Samuel’s actions are generalizable to a nation. This is simply how isolation, humiliation and disappointment at the hands of friends, family and institutions crafted one man.”

Star Tribune

And the team at Hogarth Books shares on Instagram:

“When An Island arrived on our desks last summer, several of us here at Hogarth closed our laptops for the afternoon and read it in one sitting. It’s that kind of book–short, fable-like, written in a timeless quality that makes it feel like it’s been with us forever. And its ending–it has an ending we’ve been thinking about ever since. This is one of those books that you will turn over in your mind again and again, with no simple interpretation or single meaning, and that you will desperately want to discuss with one of your best book friends. Returning to Lydia Millet’s question: An Island is history written via literature. Don’t miss it.”

Hogarth Books

Don’t miss the comment on the post by no other than Sarah Jessica Parker:

“Oh wowza!!!!!! Can’t wait!!!’x”

Karina Author, Book, Interview, Review

“GAGMAN: Exposing the horrors through humour” by Jessica Abelsohn

Could you entertain the commandant if it meant your survival? Can we turn horror into art and, dare we say it, humour? This is the question that Gagman – a uniquely uncompromising book by revered cartoonist Dov Fedler and his daughter Joanne Fedler – poses.

Gagman is scattered with comedian’s notes. The first one opens with the lines: “You think you’re a tough audience? I’ve died more times than you’ve belched …”

It’s these words that set the tone for the book, a Holocaust story with a difference and its certainly not the kind of book one would associate with a political and satirical cartoonist. Yet, it is written and illustrated by acclaimed South African cartoonist Dov Fedler along with his daughter Joanne.

Continue reading: Australian Jewish News