Karina Book

Book of the Week Special at The Book Lounge: The Fourth Boy by Andrew Robert Wilson

Journalist Grant Asher (1980s Cape Town) gets told by his mother on her deathbed that his father (who was unknown to Grant) was both gay and Jewish. Grant decides to try to find his father, which leads him to Oudtsthoorn and the news that his father has just been murdered. Grant becomes a somewhat reluctant investigator which leads him to suspect that there may be a serial killer murdering people who were part of a group of the five hundred Polish Jewish orphans who were freed from Siberia in the 1940s and were taken in by South Africa. ~ Mervyn Sloman

Set mostly in the Klein Karoo, The Fourth Boy explores notions of belonging and a myriad of other longings which I found profoundly moving. It tells the story of a young man’s search for his father against the backdrop of the 80s in apartheid South Africa and the fate of five hundred Polish WWII refugee children who arrived in Oudtshoorn in 1943. It is also a story of love, loss and betrayal. The tenderness with which Andrew Robert Wilson portrays the relationships – love and friendship – at the centre of the novel – is remarkable, and the way he resolves its greatest mystery is simply masterful. ~ Karina Szczurek, Karavan Press

You can purchase the book here (20% off):

The Book Lounge Book of the Week Special

Karina Event

Coffee with Karavan Press

You are invited to the first of six planned gatherings this year where you can chat to me, Karina, founder and publisher of Karavan Press, and likeminded writers and readers over a cup of coffee – or tea, of course – about anything related to book-writing-editing-publishing-reading. Karavan Press’s home will be open, and I will be ready to answer your questions and discuss your projects.

No need to RSVP. Just ring the bell between 10AM and 12PM on Saturday, 15 February 2025. Coffee and tea will be served. Karavan Press books will be on sale at great prices.

Karina Author, Book

Karavan Press title: Griefseed by Malika Lueen Ndlovu

ABOUT THE BOOK

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 a 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. Ndlovu’s words are a balm. She writes in community with sisters, ancestors, children, grandchildren and spirit guides from a beyond to which we are all connected, and to which her work creates pathways. Her work and words heal. Accept the offering. Within the seed of grief lies transformation, transmutation; a settling into the knowledge of the connectedness and oneness of all.

— BARBARA BOSWELL, author of The Comrade’s Wife, Grace: A Novel, And Wrote My Story Anyway: Black South African Women’s Novels as Feminism and editor of Lauretta Ngcobo: Writing as the Practice of Freedom

Publication date: February 2025

ISBN: 978-1-0672224-9-9

Cover photograph and other photographs in the book by Coral Bijoux.

Cover design: Monique Cleghorn

Respondents: Makhosazana Xaba, Janet Aalfs, Hisla Bates, Sarah Malotane Henkeman, Gcobani Qambela, Lindy ‘Gogo Masechaba’ Dlamini, Iman Rappetti, June Bam, FreeQuency, Coral Bijoux, Peter Fox, Pregs Govender, Fiona Ross, Barbara Boswell

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

MALIKA LUEEN NDLOVU is an internationally published South African poet, playwright, performer and arts project manager. Her poetry collections include Born in Africa but (1999), Womb to World: A Labour of Love (2001), Truth is Both Spirit and Flesh (2008), Invisible Earthquake: A woman’s journal through stillbirth (2009), and CLOSE (2017). Her published plays are A Coloured Place (1998) and Sister Breyani (2010).