South Africa
Leonard Thompson
A concise political history traces the forces behind South Africa's crisis, connecting present divisions to the struggles of its past.
History Botswana · South Africa
Bessie Head
A woman of mixed heritage struggles through emotional breakdown toward recovery, seeking belonging across the worlds of Botswana and South Africa.
Literary fiction South Africa
Christopher Hope
Harry Moto unsettles apartheid's racial categories in a darkly comic story exposing the absurdity and cruelty of official identity.
Literary fiction South Africa
Nadine Gordimer
Twelve stories explore love and social boundaries in South Africa, where even private relationships bear the pressures of racial division.
Literary fiction South Africa
Gerald Seymour
With a British agent facing execution in South Africa, his son sets out on a desperate attempt to free him.
Literary fiction South Africa
Wilbur Smith
Returning from the First World War, Mark Anders finds his estate ruined and begins a struggle over South African land and justice.
Literary fiction South Africa
Nadine Gordimer
Contemporary African politics and personal choices intertwine in a novel shaped by Nadine Gordimer's searching attention to South African life.
Literary fiction Fictional African country
Peter Abrahams
In an imagined African country, political ambition and competing loyalties test the possibilities and costs of a new national future.
Literary fiction Cape Town · South Africa
J.M. Coetzee
A dying Cape Town professor writes to her daughter as apartheid's violence dismantles the protections of her comfortable life.
Literary fiction South Africa
Alan Paton
Social protest and unresolved divisions animate Alan Paton's portrait of South Africa, where a beautiful landscape holds painful national contradictions.
Literary fiction South Africa · Zulu country
Ernst Havemann
Stories from Zulu country explore the ironies and uneasy connections binding white and Black lives within a divided society.
Literary fiction South Africa
Nadine Gordimer
An activist's daughter confronts her father's political legacy while seeking a life of her own in a suspicious and violent society.
Literary fiction Natal · Johannesburg
Alan Paton
A rural Zulu pastor searches Johannesburg for his family, until his son's fate binds him to another grieving father.
Literary fiction Southern Africa
Oliver Ransford
David Livingstone's ambitions and difficult relationships reveal the personal forces behind a Victorian explorer's celebrated journeys through southern Africa.
Biography South Africa
Wessel Ebersohn
A psychologist treats a man who has killed eight Black people, exposing the moral distortions of apartheid South Africa.
Literary fiction South Africa · Pretoria
Es’kia Mphahlele
Childhood and family life reveal the pressures of poverty and surveillance as Es'kia Mphahlele recalls becoming a writer in segregated South Africa.
Memoir Southern Africa
Wilbur Smith
Nineteenth-century southern Africa provides the setting for the opening struggles and ambitions of Wilbur Smith's sweeping family saga.
Literary fiction South Africa · South African townships
Njabulo S. Ndebele
Five township stories explore Black South African lives through ordinary experiences that reveal a society's deeper tensions and possibilities.
Literary fiction South Africa · Namibia · Zimbabwe
James North
A hitchhiker's encounters carry readers across southern Africa, where everyday conversation opens onto politics, sport and changing national borders.
Travel writing South Africa
Richard Stengel
One day in a Transvaal town brings three lives together, exposing the boundaries separating a veteran, merchant and activist.
Nonfiction South Africa
Nadine Gordimer
A white family flees an imagined civil war to their servant's village, where survival transforms the familiar rules of power.
Literary fiction South Africa
Christopher Hope
A priest's dreamlike journey follows the legend of hidden Boer gold into an unsettling confrontation with South African repression.
Literary fiction South Africa · Cape Town
J.M. Coetzee
A gardener's search for a place to live carries him through abandoned land, war and camps in a stark South African odyssey.
Nonfiction Livingstone in Africa Oliver Ransford
Southern Africa
Oliver Ransford
Livingstone's African journeys unfold through a biographical portrait of the explorer whose travels helped shape European perceptions of the continent.
Biography Africa · Brazil
Robert Silverberg
A captured sixteenth-century seaman travels from Brazil to Africa in an adventure built around an extraordinary incident from history.
Literary fiction Kalahari · Southern Africa
Laurens van der Post
Travelling into the Kalahari, Laurens van der Post describes desert communities and offers his own interpretation of San history.
Essays South Africa
Sidney Sheldon
Diamond wealth and a ruthless woman's ambition fuel a sprawling struggle to control a powerful business empire rooted in South Africa.
Nonfiction Burkina Faso
Breyten Breytenbach
At a Burkina Faso film festival, an Ethiopian journalist and an actor meet in a story crossing identity and exile.
Poetry Southern Africa
Wilbur Smith
Family ambitions unfold in nineteenth-century southern Africa, where opportunity and conflict shape the fortunes of Wilbur Smith's continuing saga.
Literary fiction South Africa · Cape Town
Antony Sher
A Lithuanian Jewish immigrant reaches Cape Town in 1901, carrying hopes for a new life into an unfamiliar country.
Literary fiction 
