We are happy to announce that Elleke Boehmer is returning to the Cape and will be launching her novel Ice Shock at Exclusive Books Cavendish on Monday, 3 November 2025, 5.30 for 6PM. She will be in conversation with Karin Schimke. Please join us for this special occasion!
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To say that Karina Szczurek finds refuge in books is to understate the matter. Books held her together through dispossession, flight and years of being a refugee. Certain books have travelled with her across three continents and four countries, through languages, and through love and loss.
For a long time, her mornings have begun with books – two to three hours of reading before the day begins. She has written, studied, translated and edited books.
Now she publishes them. The story of her publishing house – which has published a long string of disparate and often unusual books, and has accumulated several prizes in just six years of existence – is also a story of refuge …
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You can listen to the interview from minute 39:00: BOOK CHOICE – enjoy!
… In An Island, specificity is jettisoned, as evidenced by the use of “an” and not “the”. The character is an old man called Samuel who tends to a lighthouse, a colonial remnant, off the coast of an unnamed African country, first clawed at and pawed and squeezed and ravaged by colonial overlords, then sucked dry by the country’s dictatorial “saviour”. Samuel is a nothing, a nobody, uneducated and unheroic, but he has had the one tiny luck of getting a job manning the lighthouse on the island after he is released from decades in a prison for being an enemy of the state (which sounds much grander than his actions were). But even on an island, history and the present catch up: sea creatures, once abundant, dwindle, plastic rubbish dots the landscape…and bodies of refugees wash ashore. There is no escaping the world’s violence, malice, greed and selfishness. And there is no protection from what those do to the self. No man is an island. […]
An Island is bleak and stark, and Jennings writes in plain sentences. I read An Island in what would have been one sitting, had it not been for the interruption of night.
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