Sunday Times Literary Awards – Longlist

Love and Fury is the compelling and intimate account of the life, loves and furies of Margie Orford. In this brave memoir, the renowned South African crime writer divulges some of the harrowing experiences that have shaped her life and influenced her writing.

Through sexual assault, divorce, depression and personal loss, Orford illuminates the trauma she has navigated. Tender and courageous chapters vividly recall memories of what she has been through as a woman, mother, wife, feminist and ambitious writer.

Love and Fury shows why trauma in our past can have such an enduring and debilitating effect on women’s lives. It also unpacks the healing power of love, creativity, courage and self-reflection, ultimately offering a profound message of hope and joy for any woman who has ever questioned themselves, their trauma and who they are in the world.

This book is every woman’s love and fury.

In 1986, seven young men were shot and killed by police in Gugulethu in Cape Town. The nation was told they were part of a ‘terrorist’ MK cell plotting an attack on a police unit. An inquest followed, then a dramatic trial in 1987. A second inquest in 1989 again exonerated the police. Finally, ten years later, Eugene de Kock’s Vlakplaas unit was exposed at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for having planned and executed the cold-blooded killings. Yet their real agenda remained a mystery.

In Hunting the Seven, Beverley Roos-Muller reveals her own decades-long connection to the case and her search for the truth of their deaths, which has been shrouded in lies and mystery. Sifting through the evidence, and interviewing many of those involved, Roos-Muller reveals that it was Vlakplaas’s only operation in the Western Cape and behind it lay a shocking secret.

There is lament about how and why the ANC have so quickly become preoccupied with material enrichment. 

Former exile, business leader and political commentator, Oyama Mabandla, excavates the values that created a steady flow of pioneering South Africans under impossible circumstances, bolstered a liberation ethic and championed a leadership that made individual nobility and excellence aspirational.

These values, in retreat since 94, can still recapture the nation’s best trajectory.

In Lucas Mangope: A Life, journalist Oupa Segalwe incisively examines the public and private life of this traditional-leader-cum-elected politician, whose rise and fall coincided with the collapse of apartheid and that of the ill-advised homelands project. Segalwe compellingly traces how complex currents of self-enrichment, duty to his people, and serving the interests of all those he was indebted to played out. A balanced account of the life and times of the enigmatic Mangope.

The city of gold is in a death spiral. Award-winning journalist, inner-city activist, and municipal civil servant Nickolaus Bauer takes a deep dive into how Africa’s economic hub has reached the brink of collapse and what it will take to rescue Joburg.

For local and international readers interested in tracking the collapse and possible resurrection of one of Africa’s greatest cities.

As a young journalist, roped into court reporting to cover Jacob Zuma’s 2006 rape trial, Karyn Maughan could not have known that she would be reporting on Zuma’s legal woes for the next two decades – and would herself become his target. Disarmingly honest and deeply personal, this book takes a razor-sharp look at how powerful men use attacks on individuals who try to hold them accountable, as well as on the media and the courts, to undermine democracy.

In The Truth About Cape Slavery, Patric Tariq Mellet argues that modern South Africa – its economy and politics – is shaped and established on the foundation of chattel slavery just like the United States of America. Cape slavery, rather than minor, was a crucial feature of maritime capitalism. This then moved to become the cornerstone of the Cape’s agricultural economy. 

Dirk Aruseb was seventeen years old when Abraham Morris fetched him from the Pella orphanage to join the Bondelswarts. Dirk couldn’t wait to conquer the accursed Schutztruppe alongside legendary Kaptein Jakob Marengo, successor to Hendrik Witbooi and Jonker Afrikaner. But when he arrived at Schansvlakte deep in Namaland, Dirk was warned that he first had to master many life skills before he could join the war: be humble, be patient, be merciful. Find your eland, tame your butcherbird.

But for Dirk war was an adventure – as long as he could kill the German enemy, he was content. It didn’t matter what commander Nana Kruiper, or Klara Morris, her second in command, tried to teach him: that the liberation struggle of the Bondelswarts meant more than protecting Namaland – their promised land – at all costs.

Crimson Sands is set in Namaland – from German-South-West Africa to the Cape Colony – from 1904 to 1922, when thousands of Bondelswarts were shot down by Jan Smuts’s fighter planes. It is an epic, panoramic war novel, traversing southern Africa from Tsumeb to Upington, from internment camps in Windhuk to the dry riverbeds of the Fish River Canyon. Jeremy Vearey conjures a mesmerising tale across an arid landscape of sand, shrub and dune, evoking voices and stories long gone.

In a future dominated by technology, John grapples with the oppressive regime of The Federation, which promotes emotion suppression and AI control. Assigned to infiltrate a colony of Feelers — humans resistant to AI influence — John encounters Joshua, sparking forbidden feelings. Meanwhile, approached by time travelers, John faces a choice: go back in time to prevent technological tyranny or continue serving The Federation in ignorance.

Mangi and his fiancée, Aza, have been living together in Linden for the past eight years. One day while cleaning their bedroom, Mangi discovers Aza’s secret. The uncovering of Aza’s lie is the catalyst to the unravelling of their already tumultuous relationship. When Aza eventually ends their relationship, Mangi is left destitute.

Mangi searches for meaning as he makes his way through the streets of Joburg in The City Is Mine. 

After a mental breakdown costs him his job in New York, a young man returns to Cape Town.  He and his husband want to rebuild their lives and start a family by adopting a child, but the application forces him to confront his own past. As his life becomes enmeshed with that of his house cleaner and her toddler, his marriage begins to unravel and violence threatens to upend their new beginning. Can he help them while finding a path to healing? 

In South Africa, homicides are sometimes for insurance. But sometimes the insurance is just an added bonus.

In Bryanston, Johannesburg, one couple has loved, married and is plodding on after surviving a betrayal.  In Fourways, Johannesburg, a man is holding on to a secret that he cannot share with his wife.

Then on a rainy summer’s night, as if conspired by the universe, the lives of the two couples are forever changed. An instant connection leads to a safe and healing love, one that not even a designated WhatsApp family group or attempts at seduction can extinguish. But love is messy and life is complicated. 

And when a stylish man with a prosthetic right arm shows up brandishing a .44 Magnum, the lovers may just discover how some great love stories end. That sometimes ‘till death do us part’ has a different meaning to different people.