1. Recipes for Love and Murder by Sally Andrew

Meet Tannie Maria: A woman who likes to cook a lot and write a little. Tannie Maria writes recipes for a column in her local paper, the Klein Karoo Gazette.

One Sunday morning, as Maria savours the breeze through the kitchen window whilst making apricot jam, she hears the screech and bump that announces the arrival of her good friend and editor Harriet. What Maria doesn’t realise is that Harriet is about to deliver the first ingredient in two new recipes (recipes for love and murder) and a whole basketful of challenges.

A delicious blend of intrigue, milk tart and friendship, join Tannie Maria in her first investigation. Consider your appetite whetted for a whole new series of mysteries

2. Present Tense by Natalie Conyer

Retired police chief Piet Pieterse has been murdered, necklaced in fact. A tyre placed round his neck, doused with petrol, set alight. An execution from the apartheid era and one generally confined to collaborators. Who would target Pieterse this way, and why now?

Veteran copy Schalk Lourens is trying to forget the past. But Pieterse was his old boss and when Schalk is put on the case, he finds the past has a way of infecting the present.

Meanwhile, it’s an election year. People are pinning their hopes on charismatic ANC candidate Gideon Radebe but there’s opposition and in this volatile country, unrest is never far from the surface.

Schalk must tread a difficult path between the new regime and the old, personal and professional, and justice and revenge.

This investigation will change his life and could alter his county’s future.

3. An Elephant in My Kitchen by Françoise Malby-Anthony

Françoise Malby-Anthony never expected to find herself responsible for a herd of elephants with a troubled past. A chic Parisienne, her life changed forever when she fell in love with South African conservationist Lawrence Anthony. Together they founded a game reserve but after Lawrence’s death, Françoise faced the daunting responsibility of running Thula Thula without him. Poachers attacked their rhinos, their security team wouldn’t take orders from a woman and the authorities were threatening to cull their beloved elephant family. On top of that, the herd’s feisty new matriarch Frankie didn’t like her.

In this heart-warming and moving book, Françoise describes how she fought to protect the herd and to make her dream of building a wildlife rescue centre a reality. She found herself caring for a lost baby elephant who turned up at her house, and offering refuge to traumatized orphaned rhinos, and a hippo called Charlie who was scared of water. As she learned to trust herself, she discovered she’d had Frankie wrong all along

4. The Dark Flood by Deon Meyer

“The undisputed champion of South African crime” – Wilbur Smith

One last chance. Almost fired for insubordination, detectives Benny Griessel and Vaughn Cupido find themselves demoted, exiled from the elite Hawks unit and dispatched to the leafy streets of Stellenbosch. Working a missing persons report on student Callie de Bruin is not the level of work they are used to, but it’s all they get. And soon, it takes a dangerous, deeply disturbing turn.

One last chance. Stellenbosch is beautiful, but its economy has been ruined by one man. Jasper Boonstra and his gigantic corporate fraud have crashed the local property market, just when estate agent Sandra Steenberg desperately needs a big sale. Bringing up twins and supporting her academic husband, she is facing disaster. Then she gets a call. From Jasper Boonstra, fraudster, sexual predator and owner of a superb property worth millions, even now.

For Sandra, the stakes are high and about to get way higher. For Benny Griessel, clinging to sobriety and the relationship that saved his life, the truth about Callie can only lead to more trouble.

Taut with intrigue, murder and suspense, exploding with action and excitement, The Dark Flood is a masterpiece from the author of Trackers and The Last Hunt.

5. A Dry White Season by André Brink

Ben du Toit teaches history and geography in Johannesburg, South Africa. It is the period of the height of the youth riots in the township of Soweto. He is an ordinary, decent, harmless man, unremarkable in every way – until his sense of justice is outraged by the death of a man he has known.

His friend died at the hands of the police. In the beginning, it appears a straightforward matter, an unfortunate error that can be explained and put right.

But as Ben investigates further he finds that his curiosity becomes labelled rebellion – and for a rebel there is no way back.

6. Welcome to our Hillbrow by Phaswane Mpe

Welcome To Our Hillbrow is an exhilarating and disturbing ride through the chaotic and hyper-real zone of Hillbrow – a microcosm of all that is contradictory, alluring and painful in the changing South African psyche.

Everything is there: the shattered dreams of youth, sexuality and its unpredictable costs, AIDS, xenophobia, suicide, the omnipotent violence that often cuts short the promise of young people, and the Africanist understanding of the life continuum that does not end with death but flows on into an ancestral realm.

Infused with the rhythms of the inner city pulsebeat, this courageous novel is compelling in its honesty and its broad vision, which links Hillbrow, rural Tiragalong and Oxford. It spills out the guts of Hillbrow-living with the same energy and intimate knowledge, with which the Drum writers wrote Sophiatown into being.

7. A World of Strangers by Nadine Gordimer

Toby Hood, a young Englishman, shuns the politics and the causes his liberal parents passionately support. Living in Johannesburg as a representative of his family’s publishing company, Toby moves easily, carelessly, between the complacent wealthy white suburbs and the seething, vibrantly alive black townships.

His friends include a wide variety of people, from mining directors to black journalists and musicians, and Toby’s colonial-style weekends are often interspersed with clandestine evenings spent in black shanty towns. Toby’s friendship with Steven Sithole, a dashing, embittered young African, touches him in ways he never thought possible, and when Steven’s own sense of independence from the rules of society leads to tragedy, Toby’s life is changed forever.

8. The Fever Tree by Jennifer McVeigh

1880, South Africa – a land torn apart by greed…

Frances Irvine, left penniless after her father’s sudden death, is forced to emigrate to the Cape. In this barren country, she meets two very different men – one driven by ambition, the other by ideals. When a smallpox outbreak sends her to the diamond mines, she is drawn into a ruthless world of greed and exploitation, of human lives crushed in the scramble for power.

But here – at last – she sees her path to happiness. Torn between passion and integrity, she makes a choice that has devastating consequences…

9. Boyhood by J M Coetzee

In Boyhood, J. M. Coetzee revisits the South Africa of half a century ago, to write about his childhood and interior life.

Boyhood’s young narrator grew up in a small country town. With a father he imitated but could not respect, and a mother he both adored and resented, he picked his way through a world that refused to explain its rules, but whose rules he knew he must obey.

Steering between these contradictions, Boyhood evokes the tensions, delights and terrors of childhood with startling, haunting immediacy. Coetzee examines his young self with the dispassionate curiosity of an explorer rediscovering his own early footprints, and the account of his progress is bright, hard and simply compelling.

10. The Promise by Damon Galgut

The Booker Prize Winner 2021

The Promise charts the crash and burn of a white South African family, living on a farm outside Pretoria. The Swarts are gathering for Ma’s funeral. The younger generation, Anton and Amor, detest everything the family stand for — not least the failed promise to the Black woman who has worked for them her whole life. After years of service, Salome was promised her own house, her own land… yet somehow, as each decade passes, that promise remains unfulfilled.

The narrator’s eye shifts and blinks: moving fluidly between characters, flying into their dreams; deliciously lethal in its observation. And as the country moves from old deep divisions to its new so-called fairer society, the lost promise of more than just one family hovers behind the novel’s title.

In this story of a diminished family, sharp and tender emotional truths hit home. Confident, deft and quietly powerful, The Promise is literary fiction at its finest.