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Caroline Kurtz grew up in the remote mountains of Maji, Ethiopia in the 1950s. Inside her mud adobe home with her missionary parents and three sisters, she enjoyed American family life. Outside, her world was shaped by drums and the joy cry; Jeep and mule treks into the countryside; ostriches on the air strip; and the crackle of several Ethiopian languages she barely understood but longed to learn.

She felt she’d been exiled to a foreign country when she went to Illinois for college. She returned to Ethiopia to teach, only to discover how complex working in another culture and language really is. Life under a Communist dictatorship meant constant outages—water, electricity, sugar, even toilet paper. But she was willing to do anything, no matter how hard, to live in Ethiopia again. Yet the chaos only increased—guerillas marched down from the north, their t-shirts crisscrossed by Kalashnikov bandoliers. When peace returned, Caroline got the chance she’d longed for, to revisit that beloved childhood home in Maji. But maybe it would have been better just to treasure the memories.

Caroline Kurtz speaks Amharic fluently and spearheads development in Ethiopia’s Maji District, introducing apples, solar energy, and women’s cottage industries.

A Kirkus Reviews Best YA Book of 2022 

A USBBY 2023 Outstanding International Book

A 2022 Foreword INDIES Bronze Winner (Graphic Novels & Comics Category)

Honorable mention, 2023 Children's Africana Book Awards

2022 VLA Graphic Novel Diversity Award Overfloweth honoree

Nominated for the TLA Maverick List

 All Rise: Resistance and Rebellion in South Africa revives six true stories of resistance by marginalized South Africans against the country’s colonial government in the years leading up to Apartheid. In six parts—each of which is illustrated by a different South African artist—All Rise shares the long-forgotten struggles of ordinary, working-class women and men who defended the disempowered during a tumultuous period in South African history. From immigrants and miners to tram workers and washerwomen, the everyday people in these stories bore the brunt of oppression and in some cases risked their lives to bring about positive change for future generations.

This graphic anthology breathes new life into a history dominated by icons, and promises to inspire all readers to become everyday activists and allies. The diverse creative team behind All Rise, from an array of races, genders, and backgrounds, is a testament to the multicultural South Africa dreamed of by the heroes in these stories—true stories of grit, compassion, and hope, now being told for the first time in print.

Hannah always finds a way to get what she wants.

Daughter to Chloe Cartwright, an eccentric prize-winning writer more interested in politics than parenthood, and sister to a rugby-star brother, Hannah has never excelled at much besides shoplifting. Discovering a talent for petty crime, she steals what she needs to fit in with her wealthier school friends, while at home, her mother's sporadic paychecks often mean an empty fridge.

As an adult, Hannah falls, almost by chance, into a successful career as partner to one of South Africa’s leading chefs. But the universe has a dark sense of humor. When her mother's increasingly erratic behavior forces Hannah home again, she finds herself in a bizarre role reversal, caring for the mother who never had time to care for her. As she searches for ways— both conventional and radical— to ease Chloe’s suffering, past and present blur.

“A fast-paced and gripping thriller—expect several twists along the way.” —Cosmopolitan

Bitter Pill, part of Church’s dark web trilogy, is a gripping thriller that sweeps through the intoxicating haunts of Cape Town’s nightlife to explode in an adrenaline-laced sprint through the violent landscape of stalking, sexual deviation, and murder.

• From the Dublin Literary Award and Women's Prize for Fiction longlisted author of The Woman Next Door and An Unusual Grief
  
• Winner of the South African Literary Award First Time Author Prize
• Shortlisted for the Etisalat Prize for Literature
• Featured in the New York Times' "Globetrotting" sneak preview of books coming out in 2019 from around the world
• One of "Seven new and noteworthy fiction titles about South Africa" The Globe and Mail

Abandoned by his birth mother, losing his adoptive mother to cancer, and failing to connect with his distant adoptive father, Leke--a troubled young man living in Cape Town--has developed some odd and possibly destructive habits: he stalks strangers, steals small objects, and visits doctors and healers in search of friendship. Through a series of letters written to him from prison by his Nigerian father, a man he has never met, Leke learns about the family curse--a curse which his father had unsuccessfully tried to remove. Leke's search to break the curse leads him to strange places.

Yewande Omotoso is an architect with a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town. Her debut novel Bom Boy was published in South Africa by Modjaji Books in 2011 and was shortlisted for the 2012 Sunday Times Fiction Prize. The Woman Next Door (Chatto and Windus, 2016), Omotoso's second novel, was published to critical acclaim. She lives in Johannesburg.

Cape Town is a place between. Between two oceans, between first and third worlds, between east and west. So too the majority of its citizens, a people between black and white, native and settler, African and European. The Cape coloureds. This tween-ness complicates and perplexes. It threatens key conceptions we have about the histories, identities, and cultures of those who live on the continent. It makes us wonder how we can understand a city that is most assuredly in Africa, though not—seemingly—of it?

By exploring these liminal spaces of tween-ness—between the Cape’s breath-taking beauty and its shattering violence, between its creative cosmopolitanism and its crude racial divisions, between its glitzy wealth and its grinding poverty—we can begin to understand the soul of this town. Haunted by its past, unsure of its future. Always emerging, never arriving. A sun-drenched peninsula best viewed through a prism noir.

Compact and concise, this book allows readers to quickly identify the unique pulse of the city, its throbbing historical, social, cultural and political beat that underlies the transactions between all Capetonians. It is not a guidebook, but a perfect companion to one, filling in the intimate details that other books leave out.

Written in accessible, punchy prose, Cape Town: A Place Between offers a portrait rendered with humor, wit and passion, based on the author’s twenty-year relationship with the Cape.

Brittle Paper's "Anticipated African Books of 2024"

From Short Story Day Africa, eleven writers from Africa and the African diaspora explore the identities that connect us, the obsessions that bewitch us, and the self-delusions that drive us apart.

Passion and apathy, creation and destruction, honesty and deception—the blurred lines between these powerful forces are fundamental to the human condition. In three parts, the writers of Captive investigate these liminal spaces and rail against the boxes in which others seek to confine them, as writers, as Africans, and as humans.

Journey from the fantastical Heaven’s Mouth where time stands still, to a London bus where a neurodiverse woman steals love to the songs of Tom Jones . . . flip the page to Ghana to examine a fertility fetish, or a post-apocalyptic Lesotho where sentient AI uses our emotions against us . . . visit the deceptively beautiful islands off the Tanzanian coast, where the ocean is always hungry, and women pay the price. Captive is a riot of imagination, a collision of worlds, and a testament to the shape-shifting nature of the soul.

In A ROAD CALLED DOWN ON BOTH SIDES, Caroline explores her childhood in the remote mountains of Maji, Ethiopia in the 1950s, raised by missionary parents. After struggling to find “home” in the United States, Caroline returns to her beloved Maji as an adult to teach, only to realize it may have been better just to treasure the memories. 

In TODAY IS TOMORROW, Caroline and her husband begin working with civil war refugees in South Sudan and Kenya. Plagued by the ghosts of her past, a failing marriage, and a deep sense of self-inefficacy, Caroline battles with the impact of her work, and finds extraordinary grace within a war-torn people.

From beloved Congolese comics creator Barly Baruti and Belgian comics critic Thierry Bellefroid, translated from the original French by Batchelder Award-winning translator Ivanka Hahnenberger

A Harlem gangster’s trip to Central Africa to attend the legendary 1974 Ali-Foreman "Rumble in the Jungle" boxing match becomes a one-way ticket to the seedy underground of Zaire—complete with espionage, murder, and a communist plot to overthrow Zaire's infamous President Mobutu.

When Ernest, a low-level gangster from Harlem, wins tickets to travel to Zaire to attend the "Rumble in the Jungle," the now-legendary bout between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, he’s eager to reconnect with his African roots and escape the ruthless gang leaders he's indebted to back home. But in Zaire, Ernest becomes entangled in an Angolan coup against the country's embattled president Mobutu Sese Seko—inspired by Che Guevara himself—and soon realizes that Zaire may hold even more dangers for him than Harlem ever could.

A Cold-War-era thriller set against the backdrop of a landmark moment in sports history, Chaos in Kinshasa features Barly Baruti’s characteristic art and Thierry Bellefroid's punchy dialogue woven in with the elements of a great gangster story—sex, spies, bribes, and murder. A thrill ride through a pivotal moment in Cold War, African, and sports history.

From 2022 Windham Campbell Prize winner Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu, the complete collection of her multiple award-winning City of Kings trilogy, including The Theory of Flight, The History of Man, and The Quality of Mercy

“Perhaps the most monumental trilogy to come out of Southern Africa” (Afrocritik)
In The Theory of Flight, Ndlovu sketches decades of history in an unnamed Southern African nation through the story of Imogen “Genie” Zula Nyoni, who lies in a coma after battling a long illness. As loved ones struggle to come to terms with their impending loss, Ndlovu recounts the lives of Genie’s forebears from colonial occupation through the freedom struggle.

In The History of Man, Ndlovu takes an excursion into the interiority of the colonizer. Emil Coetzee, a civil servant in his fifties, is left unmoored by the end of his country’s civil war. His journey from boyhood to manhood, and the changes that befall him through love, loss, and war, will leave a path of bloodshed in his wake.

In The Quality of Mercy, Spokes Moloi, the first black chief inspector in the City of Kings, investigates the possible murder of Emil Coetzee, the notorious head of the Organization of Domestic Affairs. In examining Emil’s disappearance, Spokes has one last opportunity to solve the decades-old murder case that determined both the path of his life and destiny of his country.

The first book in Peter Church's Dark Web Trilogy

Young, bright and sexy, Carla Vitale has been handpicked to run Supertech, Africa’s leading independent Engineering firm. Then one Friday afternoon in Cape Town, her dream is shattered. Her boss and mentor, Nial Townley, disappears, his luxury vehicle is found in a crevice at the bottom of Chapman’s Peak and $USD 20m is missing from the Supertech’s overseas accounts. Three months later and the police are no closer to solving the riddle.

No job, no car, no phone, Carla turns to the one person she believes can help: software hacker turned day-trader, Daniel Le Fleur. But Le Fleur’s maintaining a low profile in Bantry Bay and he’s in no mood to ruin the serendipity.

After a successful career in Information Technology, Peter Church’s first crime novel, Dark Video, was published in South Africa and Australia in 2008. He has since published Bitter Pill, a crime thriller, and Blue Cow Sky, “a novella of sexual proportions,” both in South Africa. Church is a member of SA PEN. He lives in Cape Town with his wife, the artist Paula Church, and three children. Crackerjack is his debut in North America.

A dark, intriguing, and satisfying tale with strong characters.

They find her body in the veld near Cape Town, South Africa. A teenager. She's not the first. Recently widowed Detective Jan Magson has to look mothers and fathers in the eye. Has to answer their questions. He can't. He can't even answer his estranged son's questions about how his wife died. Alone with his pistol at night, a good man faces his inner darkness.

A tense and grisly debut novel of suspense from South Africa.--Kirkus, starred review

After obtaining degrees in Psychology and Criminology, Martin Steyn studied serial killers and profiling. Dark Traces is his first novel in English.

The second installment in Peter Church's Dark Web Trilogy

Alistair Morgan is the key. A gifted law student with a glittering career in the offing, Alistair seems to have it all: looks, charm and money. But his privileged lifestyle is about to be turned upside down as he is lured deeper and deeper into the sinister online world of Dark Video, where reality blurs and morals unravel.

Toggling between the urban landscape of Africa’s southern tip and Seattle, Washington in the mid- to late-2000s, just as YouTube and other video sharing sites were getting started, Dark Video explores the most disturbing and darkest corners of the digital world, where some people will pay for unimaginable videos and others make money in the most depraved way possible.

The complete Dark Web trilogy from Peter Church, the master of South African crime fiction. Strap in for the adrenaline-laced Dark Web trilogy, exploring the darkest depths of Cape Town’s criminal underworld. 

In Crackerjack, a sexy engineer hires a reformed hacker in Cape Town to help solve her boss's disappearance—but the hunt quickly becomes deadly.

In Dark Video, two college boys with a camcorder discover the price high bidders in the darkest corners of the internet will pay for sinister videos.

In Bitter Pill, the intoxicating haunts of Cape Town’s nightlife deliver drugged college women to paying patrons, eager for sexual deviation and even murder.

 This genre-spanning anthology explores the many ways that we grow, adapt, and survive in the face of our ever-changing global realities. These evocative, often prescient, stories showcase new and emerging writers from across Africa to investigate many of the pressing issues of our time: climate change, pandemics, social upheaval, surveillance, and more. 

 In Disruption, authors from across Africa use their stories to explore the concept of change—environmental, political, and physical—and the power or impotence of the human race to innovate our way through it. From a post-apocalyptic African village in Innocent Ilo’s “Before We Die Unwritten,” to space colonization in Alithnayn Abdulkareem’s “Static,” to a mother’s attempt to save her infant from a dust storm in Mbozi Haimbe’s “Shelter,” Disruption illuminates change around and within, and our infallible capacity for hope amidst disaster. Facing our shared anxieties head on, these authors scrutinize assumptions and invent worlds that combine the fantastical with the probable, the colonial with the dystopian, and the intrepid with the powerless, in stories recognizing our collective future and our disparate present.

 Disruption is the newest anthology from Short Story Day Africa, a non-profit organization established to develop and share the diversity of Africa’s voices through publishing and writing workshops.

Employed to find a set of missing uncut diamonds, ex-addict Rae Valentine, a feisty, sexy, intrepid, newly-minted Private Investigator, falls prey to the gang of men intent to use her and destroy her for sport. Rae can’t outrun the storm of righteous fury as the vicious gang escalate their violence. As a victim of a kidnapping, she does what she can to protect herself from these depraved and barbarous men, and to save her PI partner, Vincent Saldana, from certain death.

From Cape Town to the banks of the Orange River in Namibia, the tension rises as Rae fights for her life and discovers that the missing diamonds are linked to the illicit dealings of the brutal gang without conscience.

From Commonwealth Book Prize Shortlisted Author Bridget Pitt

Finalist for the Tuscarora Award for Historical Fiction and the Sunday Times Literary Fiction Long List 

A Zulu foundling and a white missionary’s child raised as brothers in a world intent on making them enemies. A sweeping tale of identity, kinship, and atonement, set in 1870s South Africa, a decade of ruthless colonial aggression against the nation's indigenous people.

Moses, a Zulu baby discovered on a riverbank, and Daniel, the son of white missionaries, are raised as brothers on the Umzinyathi mission in 19^th century Zululand, South Africa. As an infant, Daniel narrowly escapes an attack by a rhino and develops an intense corporeal connection to animals which challenges the religious dogma on which he is raised. Despite efforts by his adoptive mother to raise the boys as equals, Moses feels like an outsider to both white and Zulu society, and seeks certainty in astronomy and science. Only through each other do the brothers find a sense of belonging.

At Umzinyathi, Moses and Daniel are cushioned from the harsh realities of the expanding colony in neighboring Natal—where ancient spiritualism is being demonized, vast natural beauty faces rampant destruction, and the wealth of the colonizer depends on the engineered impoverishment of the indigenous. But when they leave the mission to work on a relative’s sugar estate and accompany him on a hunting safari, the boys are thrown into a world that sees their bond as a threat to the colonial order, and must confront an impossible choice: adapting to what society expects of them or staying true to each other.

With elements of magic realism, Eye Brother Horn is the heart-wrenching story of how two children born of vastly different worlds strive to forge a true brotherhood with each other and with other species, and to find ways to heal the deep wounds inflicted by the colonial expansion project.

A Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection

A 2023 Skipping Stones Honoree

A School Library Journal Best Book of 2022

Part of Niki Daly's Lolo series

More fun is on the way for Lolo in Fly High, Lolo, the fourth book in Niki Daly's Lolo series for beginning readers. Lolo is kind-hearted, creative, full of joy, and— whether it’s making homemade Christmas decorations from recycled plastics, or stepping in when the school play goes awry—she always knows just what to do to save the day!

In this collection of easy-to-read stories, we meet Lolo, a girl who lives in South Africa with her mother and grandmother, Gogo. Charmingly illustrated by the author, Fly High, Lolo follows Lolo as she explores her world, and the new adventures each day brings.

In Fly High, Lolo, Lolo gets an unexpected role in the school play, meets Miss Teen the Beauty Queen, goes on a beach clean-up with Mama’s new friend, and makes beautiful recycled Christmas decorations.

A Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection

A 2023 Skipping Stones Honoree

A School Library Journal Best Book of 2022

Part of Niki Daly's Lolo series

More fun is on the way for Lolo in Fly High, Lolo, the fourth book in Niki Daly's Lolo series for beginning readers. Lolo is kind-hearted, creative, full of joy, and— whether it’s making homemade Christmas decorations from recycled plastics, or stepping in when the school play goes awry—she always knows just what to do to save the day!

In this collection of easy-to-read stories, we meet Lolo, a girl who lives in South Africa with her mother and grandmother, Gogo. Charmingly illustrated by the author, Fly High, Lolo follows Lolo as she explores her world, and the new adventures each day brings.

In Fly High, Lolo, Lolo gets an unexpected role in the school play, meets Miss Teen the Beauty Queen, goes on a beach clean-up with Mama’s new friend, and makes beautiful recycled Christmas decorations.

"Vermeulen vibrantly, gloriously, unabashedly shares her “imperfect life.”—Starred Review Booklist  

In this graphic memoir, Cape Town artist Karen Vermeulen reflects on the absurdities of contemporary womanhood—from romance and friendship to the ever-elusive “self-care”.

Trust her—Karen is trying really hard to be an adult. Harder than she should probably have to, as a thirty-something with a cat, a flat, and a job. She would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for those meddling influencers, always raising the bar of what it means to be a proper woman.

Accompanied by her trademark quirky artwork and signature wit, Karen pokes fun at her attempts to “grow up”: whether that’s becoming a meditation girlie, getting Botox, faking self-confidence, using dating apps, going to therapy, or living the childfree life (unless you count her feline companion Sir Henry, which, of course, she does.)

From emotional support pigs to ectopic pregnancies, cuticle care to under-boob chakras, the laugh-out-loud and deeply perceptive illustrated essays in Good Luck To Us All are a testament to these wild and crazy times.

A CBC Spring 2024 Showcase Selection

In the final years of South Africa’s Apartheid era, an unlikely trio—a sheltered white rugby player, a black farmworker’s son, and an Indian shopkeeper’s daughter—discover the consequences of knowing the truth and having the courage to speak it. Halley’s Comet is the coming-of-age story of Pete de Lange, a white 16-year-old schoolboy, set in small-town South Africa in 1986. Pete lives a relatively sheltered life, primarily concerned with girls and rugby— until one January night changes everything. Thrust together with two complete strangers—Petrus, a black farmworker’s son and Sarita, an Indian shopkeeper’s daughter—the trio find themselves running for their lives from the vicious Rudie, whose actions will ripple far beyond that fateful night. This era-defying friendship—sparked by a shared secret— challenges everything Pete thought he knew and believed. And when anti-Apartheid revolutionaries set their sights on the town, it will change the course of the three young people’s lives forever. Halley’s Comet is a story of friendship, love, change, taking chances, hope, a comet, and some pretty cool 80s music.

Part of Niki Daly's Lolo series

For Lolo, every day's a new adventure. Whether it's earning gold stars at school or returning a lost ring, she's ready for anything. Follow along with Lolo as she learns lessons about sharing, being brave, and being a good friend.

In these easy-to-read stories, we meet the curious, fun-loving, adventurous Lolo, a girl living in South Africa with her mother and grandmother, Gogo. Woven with heart and humor, and illustrated with charming black-and-white drawings, these stories are perfect for the beginning reader.

In Here Comes Lolo, Lolo gets a gold star at school, longs for a cute floppy hat, finds a missing ring, and helps to rescue a dog, all with her trademark humor and quirky style.

Part of Niki Daly's Lolo series

Hooray! Hurrah! Hurray! for Lolo, the energetic, curious, and fun-loving girl at the center of Niki Daly's series of books for beginning readers. She's thoughtful, funny, and always ready for anything. Whether it's helping to babysit baby Bongi or learning all about the library, she's sure to do it with kindness and humor.

In this collection of easy-to-read stories, we meet Lolo, a girl who lives in South Africa with her mother and grandmother, Gogo. Charmingly illustrated by the author, Hooray for Lolo follows Lolo as she explores her world, and the new adventures each day brings.

In Hooray for Lolo, Lolo she gets angry with her best friend, finds a favorite library book, goes to the hospital, and helps to look after Baby Bongi.

A Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection

Part of Niki Daly's Lolo series

Hooray! Hurrah! Hurray! for Lolo, the energetic, curious, and fun-loving girl at the center of Niki Daly's series of books for beginning readers. She's thoughtful, funny, and always ready for anything. Whether it's helping to babysit baby Bongi or learning all about the library, she's sure to do it with kindness and humor.

In this collection of easy-to-read stories, we meet Lolo, a girl who lives in South Africa with her mother and grandmother, Gogo. Charmingly illustrated by the author, Hooray for Lolo follows Lolo as she explores her world, and the new adventures each day brings.

In Hooray for Lolo, Lolo gets angry with her best friend, finds a favorite library book, goes to the hospital, and helps to look after Baby Bongi.

A Skipping Stones Winner, 2024

Hi!! I'm Epi Dermis, but my friends just call me Skin!

Raise your hands if you sweat, tan, itch, have hair, or have freckles!  

I've been feeling pretty sensitive lately because everybody has something to say about me. But people don't always tell the truth.

My color doesn't make me fast, strong, smart, or scary. I just want to shout, "It's just skin, silly!" 

"[A]n irresistibly brilliant, pitch-perfect page-turner that should be a must-read in every Pre-K and Elementary School in our country." — Henry Louis Gates Jr

An illustrated children's book on the evolution of skin color, based on a collective 40+ years of peer-reviewed research from expert anthropologist Dr. Nina Jablonski and historian Dr. Holly Y. McGee, with a special foreword from celebrated literary critic and historian Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Meet Epi Dermis, your kid's quirky, clever guide to the origin of skin color! Using simple science and interactive activities, Epi takes readers on an adventure through human history to find out why skin is the hardest working organ in the body business. Whether it’s how migration and climate changed our skin's need for melanin, to why sweat is your body’s secret superpower, Epi’s got all the facts—and uses them to challenge false narratives about race and give kids the information they need to do the same.

2023 ALA Best Graphic Novels for Children

The daughter of a river god, raised by a human father and bound to a tragic destiny. An African fantasy-adventure graphic novel inspired by the mythology of the Zambezi River and the history of the Kariba Dam, one of the largest dams ever constructed.

When Tongai ventures to the Kariba Dam to find a cure for Siku and never returns, she sets off to find him with the help of Amedeo, the young son of Kariba’s chief engineer. Together, they traverse elephant graveyards, rugged jungles, and ancient ruins, outrunning pirates, bootleggers, and shape-shifting prophets ready to use Siku to their own advantage. But Siku soon discovers that her father has been shielding a terrible secret: Siku is actually the daughter of the Great River Spirit, Nyaminyami, and the only way to bring about the necessary rumuko - a ritual which has brought balance to the Zambezi for centuries - is for Siku to give up the only life she's ever known.

With the future of the Shonga resting on her shoulders, Siku must journey to the source of the river to understand the ancient power hidden within her. 

In KARIBA, a young girl’s strange abilities to manipulate water grow out of control. When Siku’s father goes to the Kariba Dam in search of a cure and never returns, she set off on a dangerous journey to find him, through Zimbabwe’s rugged jungles, elephant graveyards, and ancient ruins. On the run from pirates, bootleggers, and shape-shifting prophets ready to use her power to their own advantage, Siku soon discovers a terrible secret that will change her life—and her people—forever. 

In Pearl by the Sea, a young freediver named Pearl struggles to fit into her life on land in her impoverished South African town, where her father can’t pay the bills, and every encounter with her crush Naomi seems to go horribly wrong. But when Pearl meets a giant sea monster in need of a friend, she’ll need help from the people she loves—and her one-eyed pup sidekick—to save him from evil poachers.

In her debut collection of short fiction, Reneilwe Malatji invites us into the intimate lives of South African women—their whispered conversations, their love lives, their triumphs and heartbreaks. This diverse chorus of female voices recounts misadventures with love, family, and community in powerful stories woven together with anger, politics, and wit. Malatji crafts an engaging collection full of rich, memorable characters who navigate work, love, patriarchy, and racism with thoughtfulness, strength, and humor.

• A Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection
• The 2024 Skipping Stones Honor Awards
• A 2024 IBBY Honour List Selection
• A 2023 Charlotte Zolotow Award Honor Book
• Winner of the 2022 South African Literary Awards Children's Literature Award
• Honorable mention, 2023 Children's Africana Book Awards
• A Cooperative Children's Book Center 2023 Choices Pick  

Whether it’s jumping in puddles with Tata in the rain, greeting the neighborhood cat on the quiet back streets with Gogo, or holding hands with Mama while rushing to make the bell, walking to school with family is the best. But nothing is better than walking to school with Papa. From high above, resting on Papa’s shoulders, all of the town is in perfect view, and Papa always says “I love you” when he says goodbye. 

A sweet ode to fatherhood and the special relationships children share with each member of their family, On My Papa’s Shoulders reminds us that it’s not about where we’re going, but rather the people who walk with us along the way.

• One of "10 Novels You Should Read in June" —CrimeReads
• Starred review, Publishers Weekly
• Listed on CrimeReads' "The Most Anticipated Crime Books of 2020: Summer Reading Edition"
• Listed in the New York Times "Globetrotting" 2020 preview

FROM THE AWARD-WINNING ANIMATION TEAM BEHIND THE FILMS KHUMBA, ZAMBEZIA, AND SEAL TEAM

2024 YALSA Great Graphic Novels for Teens

2023 ALA Best Graphic Novels for Children

Pearl has always felt more comfortable in the sea than surrounded by the people in her sleepy South African town who always seem to let her down. But when a new friend from below the surface is taken by poachers, Pearl may need a little help after all.

Since her mother left, Pearl has spent more and more time in the ocean, fishing to help her father pay the bills. But when she gets mixed up with a group of illegal abalone poachers and starts diving near a restricted wreck, Pearl meets an ancient sea monster named Otto—who isn’t quite as monstrous as she thought. And when Otto’s enemies come back to finish what they started, Pearl is the only one who can save him, but only if she has the courage to let go of her past and open up to others—including the girl from class she’s got a crush on. 

With her one-eyed pup sidekick and a whole lot of nerve, Pearl may just be able to save Otto and finally tell the truth to her father… and, more importantly, to herself. With vibrant full-color illustrations, Pearl of the Sea is a South African adventure story exploring how we are both bound to and freed by nature, seen through the eyes of a tough teen-aged heroine determined to live life by her own rules. 

A mutilated body is found floating in a small row boat on tranquil waters of the scenic Knysna estuary on South Africa’s southern tip. A high profile victim. Captain Josh Holland, a trainee detective with a background in law, is thrown into the deep end of a major murder investigation, under the wing of the experienced and respected Colonel Gavin Whitall of the SAPS Serious Crimes Unit in George. The pair pursue this elusive murderer, across the country and beyond the borders of South Africa, realizing that to find their quarry, they need to solve a 35-year-old mystery. The chase leads them into the seedy gangland of drug lords and violent criminals that span the rocky tip of Africa, the corrupting tendrils and tantalizing clues reaching back into the African National Congress’s armed struggle in the turbulent 1980s. As they track down a ruthless killer, the body count stacks up in this relentless tale of greed, violence and revenge.

Rejected by everyone except her extraordinary daughter, Caz lives a secluded life in rural South Africa. But a single phone call from her estranged sister shatters this refuge. This phone call is the first step down an ever-widening tunnel into Caz's painful past. From the Congo's sparkling diamond mines to Belgium's finest art galleries, from Africa's civil unrest to its deeply spiritual roots, Sacrificed seamlessly crosses borders and decades with a fiercely captivating story.

Chanette Paul has published forty-one bestselling romance, thriller, and crime novels in her native Afrikaans in South Africa. This is her first book to be translated into English.

Mercy lives in modern-day Pietermaritzburg, South Africa with her eccentric foster aunts—two elderly sisters so poor, they can only afford one lightbulb. A nasty housing developer is eying their house. And that same house suddenly starts falling apart—just as Aunt Flora starts falling apart. She’s forgetting words, names, and even how to behave in public. Mercy tries to keep her head down at school so nobody notices her. But when a classmate frames her for stealing the school’s raffle money, Mercy's teachers decide to take a closer look at her home life.

Along comes Mr. Singh, who rents the back cottage of the house on Hodson Road. When he takes Mercy to visit a statue in the middle of the city, she learns that the shy, nervous “Mohandas” he tells stories about is actually Gandhi, who spent a cold and lonely night in the waiting room of the Pietermaritzburg train station over a hundred years ago. It marked the beginning of his life’s quest for truth…and the visit to his statue marks Mercy’s realization that she needs—just like Gandhi—to stand up for herself.

Mercy needs a miracle. But to summon that miracle, she has to find her voice and tell the truth—and that truth is neither pure nor simple.

A Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection

A 2024 Skipping Stones Honor Award winner 

Winner of The Next Generation Indie Book Award 

From the award-winning author of Small Mercies, named a Best Middle-Grade Book of 2020 by Kirkus Reviews

When Boipelo Seku learns about a man who traded his way from a paperclip to a house, he starts a trade of his own in his small village of Cedarville, South Africa, accidentally setting in motion a string of good deeds that will change his community forever.

"I’ve decided that some people put out fires and leave the world cold and hopeless and others nurse the kindling, blow like mad and fan the flames with whatever they have at hand - so that everyone feels its warmth."

A lot of things can feel just out of reach in 12-year-old Boipelo Seku's small, impoverished village of Cedarville, South Africa. The idea of one day living in a house that's big enough for his family is just a faraway dream. But when Boi stumbles on a story about a Canadian man who traded his way from a paperclip to a house, Boi hatches his own trading plan starting with a tiny clay cow he molded from river mud. Trade by trade, Boi and his best friend Potso discover that even though Cedarville lacks so many of the things that made the paperclip trade possible, it is fuller than either of them ever imagined.

In a chain of events that turns Boi's tiny spark into a warming fire, Boi learns the power of friendship and community, and finds that something’s value isn’t in what you can trade for it, but in the good it brings to the people you love.

With a motley crew of characters, wholehearted humor, and a whole lot of hope, The Cedarville Shop and the Wheelbarrow Swap is a joyful read for lovers of The Penderwicks or classics like The Moffats.

Big-hearted, kaleidoscopic, and honest, The Enumerations explores the far-reaching legacies of mental illness and trauma, and the children left to pick up the pieces of their parents’ emotional lives.

Noah Groome counts to five. At seventeen, he can do more than that, but counting everything in fives—from the steps he takes to the minutes in the day—keeps his raging anxiety at bay. The voice in his head, which he calls The Dark, controls everything he does. And it’s getting worse.

His increasingly severe OCD impacts every member of Noah’s family: his mother Kate, desperate for comfort as her home life falls apart; his father Dominic, who retreats emotionally as old demons rise to the surface; his protective little sister Maddie, forced to be the happy child; and most of all Noah, a troubled teenager trying to protect his loved ones from himself.

Following a violent incident at school, Noah is sent to rehab in Cape Town, where he meets Juliet, a rebellious girl with a sex addiction who isn't afraid of the voice in Noah’s head. As bonds are made and long-held secrets are revealed, Noah is not the only one who will find healing.

Somewhere in South Africa, a farm comes under heavy attack. No shooters in sight. Only one thing is certain: The attackers are savagely resolute. A diverse group of people barricade themselves inside the farmhouse: black and white; women, men, and children; bosses and workers; a police officer; random visitors. Who is the target of the attack? What has motivated it? Politics? Revenge? Greed? Drugs? Weapons? But do the people outside know more than those indoors? The snipers who are trying to operate in the dark of night? Who will die, who will survive? Who is pulling the strings? Who will be the winners, who will be the losers? And how long can eight hours actually be?

Eight hours, minute by minute. Constant changes in perspective, piercing precision. An explosive mixture of psychological thriller and Neo-western with a political subtext.

The last installment of the top selling Fiery Spiral Trilogy.

In a dystopian future Cape Town, Teenager Ebba Den Eeden is desperate to restore ecological and social harmony to an Earth torn apart by the warring Gods Theia and her brother Prospiroh. To end the divine conflict, Ebba must guard and return the necklace of four amulets to Theia. Forced to search the utopian planet of Celestia, which is populated by people who died on Earth, Ebba is guided by a magical map and Lucas Poladion- who died in Cape Town saving Ebba's life-, and their annoyance at one another laced with complications... and maybe something deeper.

As Ebba crosses time and landscapes, the God Prospiroh stalks her and will do anything to get his hands on the necklace. The further Ebba journeys, the more difficult the choices she faces become. She searches for strength, guided by spiritual encounters with her female ancestors, all the while grappling with the burden of her hunt and the betrayal of Micah, her ex-boyfriend.

The Fiery Spiral combines mysticism, magic, and time travel in a tale of impossible decisions and the great sacrifices that can come with destiny. A mythical dystopian fantasy that plays out on the shore of South Africa, for lovers of Akata Witch and Children of Blood and Bone.

From 2022 Windham Campbell Prize winner Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu

Book 2 in the City of Kings trilogy, including  her multiple award-winning debut novel The Theory of Flight

Emil Coetzee, a civil servant in his fifties, is washing blood off his hands when the ceasefire is announced. Like everyone else, he feels unmoored by the end of the conflict. War had given him his sense of purpose, his identity. But why has Emil's life turned out so different from his parents’, who spent cheery Friday evenings flapping and flailing the Charleston or dancing the foxtrot? What happened to the Emil who used to wade through the singing elephant grass of the savannah, losing himself in it?

Continuing the interconnected stories she began in her award-winning novel The Theory of Flight, Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu explores decades of history through the eyes of one man on his journey from boyhood to manhood, and the changes that befall him through love, loss, and war. With sympathy, complexity, and penetrating insight, The History of Man explores what makes a man, a father, and a nation.

Religious and ethnic conflict may be the Horn of Africa's most enduring recent legacy. But beneath its recent history of war and displacement lies human stories—families, clans, lovers, neighbors, and friends, all bound together through common cultural, religious, and historical ties.

The Lion's Binding Oath, Ahmed Ismail Yusuf's collection of short stories, introduces readers to the people of Somalia and their struggles: their humanity, faith, identity, friendship, and family bonds, as whispers of war grow louder around them. Through stories that span the years before and during Somali's civil war, Yusuf weaves together Somalia's political, social, and religious conflicts with portrayals of the country's love of poetry, music, and soccer.

Yusuf's collection is a powerful examination of love and resilience in a country torn apart by war, and written with deep compassion for the lives of its characters.

Winner, Outstanding Fiction Book Prize, Zimbabwe National Arts Merit Awards 

Shortlist, 2023 Sunday Times Literary Awards

Best African Books of 2023, African Arguments

From 2022 Windham Campbell Prize winner Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu, the breathtaking conclusion to her multiple award-winning City of Kings trilogy, including The Theory of Flight and The History of Man, “Perhaps the most monumental trilogy to come out of Southern Africa.”—Afrocritik

Everyone saw Emil Coetzee drive into the bush the day the ceasefire was announced. Beatrice, busy consoling her friend Kuki over the loss of her son and marriage. Dikeledi, the postwoman who refuses to lean. Tom, the drunk who makes his living impersonating Emil in backroads bars. Vida de Villiers, stuck in a coin-toss choice. Saskia, the feisty reporter determined to ruin Emil’s name. Marion, the enigmatic lover he left behind. Mrs. Louisa Alcott, the lonely farm wife reading Mills & Boon romances in her best dress, waiting for her life to begin. But nobody saw him drive out of it. 

So begins the investigation of Spokes Moloi, the first black chief inspector in the City of Kings, who on the eve of his retirement is handed one final crime: the possible murder of Mr. Coetzee, the notorious head of the Organization of Domestic Affairs, who disappeared on the same day the country's independence beckoned. In investigating Emil’s disappearance, Spokes' path collides with an assortment of witnesses with the best and worst of intentions—including a pair of corrupt investigators with an eye towards framing the guerrilla icon Golide Gumede for Emil’s murder, and the insatiable public, infatuated with Emil and unable to come to terms with the fact that the future they had so long anticipated had, at last, arrived.

With a nation in flux and his beloved wife Loveness forever present in his mind, Spokes’ investigation leads him back to the very beginning— and gives him one last chance to solve the twenty-year-old murder case that determined both the path of his life and destiny of his country.

Bokang’s life is falling apart as his family spirals into poverty and conflict over his father's gambling and alcohol addiction.  

Bokang Damane is a talented outsider, a dreamer, at his prestigious school. His problems mount after writing an essay – not even a controversial essay – on racial or political issues. Just a short paper on suicide. Really? Talk about drama. Now life is just a slog of unsolvable problems. Problem #1: Not black enough for the black kids and too black for the white kids. Yep, that’s what happens when you attend a pompous all boys’ school and live in the suburbs. Problem #2: Family finances are a joke – they can’t even afford Bokang’s initiation as a Xhosa. How can he function without respect, respect that only a Xhosa man commands after the weeks-long initiation ordeal in the countryside? Problem #3: An alcoholic, gambling attorney for a father who expects the world to bend to his will or fist.

Bokang just wants to rap, sketch, and be left alone. Everyone keeps talking about Bokang reaching his true potential, but everyone also keeps getting in the way. So what happens? Boy meets girl – a beautiful girl, Nokwanda. It wouldn’t be a story otherwise. But she comes with her own set of issues. Most of all, Napoleon, her hulking on again, off again boyfriend who has been known to assuage his jealousies with a good old-fashioned beat-down.

It’s a fight to find the flow – a spark to rise above the raging seas of family strife and school pressure and discover a path, though fraught with danger, into the future.

"This transcendent and powerful testament to the indomitable human spirit is not to be missed." —Publishers Weekly, starred review

From 2022 Windham Campbell Prize winner Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu

Book 1 in the City of Kings trilogy

With the lightest of touches, and with an overlay of magical-realist beauty, this novel sketches, through the lives of a few families and the fate of a single patch of ground, decades of national history (a country in Southern Africa that is never named) - from colonial occupation through the freedom struggle, to the devastation wrought by the sojas, the HIV virus, and The Man Himself. At turns mysterious and magical, but always honest, The Theory of Flight explores the many ways we lose those we love before they die.

Winner of the 2017 German Crime Fiction Prize

Mistaken identities, racial profiling, and class politics form the backdrop of this intense thriller. The Wall tackles the issues of gun violence, racism, and exclusion in contemporary South Africa—problems that are equally relevant in the United States.

"Annas works like a film director, bombarding us with shot and counter-shot. The reader races to the explosion… an actual shootout. THE WALL is a fantastic, yet very funny, novel... Fast, hard and dangerous. A cheetah in book form." Die Welt (Germany)

"Fear and distrust of anyone who counts as 'the other.' [...]…jam-packed with action, thrills and suspense. A brilliant success!" Deutschlandradio Kultur (Germany)

"Ducking, hiding, running - these are what drive the novel's dynamics, its minute-by-minute choreography. Instincts dictate behaviors. In this case: prejudice, aversions, and racism." Süddeutsche Zeitung (Germany)

Before writing novels, Max Annas worked as a journalist. A renowned film critic, his first novel, The Farm, is currently under film production in South Africa.

Caroline finds relief in teaching and peace work in South Sudan, but the heavy responsibility she now carries for dozens of vulnerable families—coupled with the prevailing ideas of Biblical womanhood that put pressure on her personal life—makes it increasingly clear that Caroline is under-prepared for the high-stakes crisis in which she is now embedded.

Through a number of consequential mistakes and increasingly debilitating self-doubt, Caroline clings to hope that her willingness to stand with the South Sudanese will count for something in the end. A deeply personal examination of South Sudan at war—and a woman at war with herself—Today is Tomorrow shines a warm light on the darkest of places.

Family secrets run deep for Grace, a young girl growing up in Cape Town during the 1980s. Her family secrets spill over into adulthood, and threaten to ruin the respectable life she has built for herself.

When an old childhood friend emerges after disappearing a decade earlier during a clash with apartheid riot police in the Cape Flats, where South Africa’s coloured community makes its home, Grace’s memories of her childhood come rushing back, and she is confronted, once again, with the loss that has shaped her. She has to face up to the truth or continue to live a lie—but the choice is not straightforward. Unmaking Grace is an intimate portrayal of violence, both personal and political, and its legacy on one person’s life. It meditates on the long shadow cast by personal trauma, showing the inter-generational imprint of violence and loss on people’s lives.

A Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection

A CBC Spring 2024 Showcase Selection

No matter where she goes, or how big she grows, Wanjikũ knows her name.

In the lush Kenyan countryside, a young Gikũyũ girl helps her grandmother with daily tasks. Here, as she tends to the cows, carries water, and plays in the fruit trees and sugarcane, she is called Wanjikũ.

On the busy city streets of Nairobi, where she goes to school, she is called by her English name, Catherine. But at home with Wangarĩ, the maid who cooks and cares for her, she is again Wanjikũ.

All grown up in boarding school, Catherine is the leader of her class, surrounded by friends from different cultural backgrounds. But at night, when she gathers with her fellow Gikũyũ sisters to speak her mother tongue, she is Wanjikũ once more.

Gloriously illustrated, alive with the joie de vivre of girlhood, and based on the author's own beloved childhood memories, Wanjikũ, Child of Mine is an ode to the heritage that walks alongside us, and a love song for the sisters we make on the journey.

Selected as a 2019 Outstanding International Book by the United States Board on Books for Young People (USBBY)

Ntshingila's lyrically wrought North American debut is a slim yet satisfying novel sure to trigger a wide range of emotions."Kirkus, starred review

"It is a story about joy and hope and courage, and what it means to lift up others and be lifted oneself, and how one young girl found her voice in a world seemingly determined to take it away."Shelf Awareness, starred review

The terrible thing that steals 14-year-old Mvelo’s song leads to startling revelations and unexpected opportunities.

Life wasn’t always this hard for 14-year-old Mvelo. There were good times living with her mother and her mother's boyfriend. Now her mother is dying of AIDS and what happened to Mvelo is the elephant in the room, despite its growing presence in their small shack. In this Shakespeare-style comedy, the things that seem to be are only a façade and the things that are revealed hand Mvelo a golden opportunity to change her fate. We Kiss Them With Rain explores both humor and tragedy in this modern-day fairy tale set in a squatter camp outside of Durban, South Africa.

A Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection

Part of Niki Daly's Lolo series

Lolo's back for a whole new set of adventures in You're a Star, Lolo, the third book in Niki Daly's Lolo series for beginning readers. Whether it's turning her garden into a snail farm when snails eat up her precious tomato plant, or using her hair ribbons to save the day when a friend's car breaks down – there's a unique solution to every problem, and Lolo is going to find it!

These stories invite young readers into the life and adventures of fun-loving, clever, and curious Lolo, a young girl living in South Africa. Along with her mother and grandmother, Gogo, she can always find a way to make the best out of any situation— even when things don't go as planned.

In You're a Star, Lolo, join Lolo as she makes her mom an extra-special soup, goes on vacation with her Gogo, and even tracks down the scary Ghorra-Ghorra-Hoooaaah-Bwoooooo-Monster sound she keeps hearing at night!

A Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection

Part of Niki Daly's Lolo series

Lolo's back for a whole new set of adventures in You're a Star, Lolo, the third book in Niki Daly's Lolo series for beginning readers. Whether it's turning her garden into a snail farm when snails eat up her precious tomato plant, or using her hair ribbons to save the day when a friend's car breaks down – there's a unique solution to every problem, and Lolo is going to find it!

These stories invite young readers into the life and adventures of fun-loving, clever, and curious Lolo, a young girl living in South Africa. Along with her mother and grandmother, Gogo, she can always find a way to make the best out of any situation— even when things don't go as planned.

In You're a Star, Lolo, join Lolo as she makes her mom an extra-special soup, goes on vacation with her Gogo, and even tracks down the scary Ghorra-Ghorra-Hoooaaah-Bwoooooo-Monster sound she keeps hearing at night!

• 2022 Shortlist, Hurston/Wright Legacy Award
• Winner, Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa
• Winner, 2011 Herman Charles Bosman Award
• Winner, Sunday Times Fiction Prize
• Winner, The Sunday Times Literary Award

Sipho, a 17-year-old from the Umlazi township, drops out of high school and joins a car hijacking syndicate to make a name for himself and escape his family’s low-income life. Along with hijacking partners Musa and Vusi, Sipho learns the tricks of the dangerous trade and pushes deeper into the underbelly of Umlazi under the guidance of gang leader Sibani, while partying heavily and juggling different women nightly alongside his longtime girlfriend Nana.

Candid and unapologetic, Young Blood is the story of the intricate balance of circumstance and choice, swift gain and incredible loss, as Sipho finds out how far he can push his luck before the damage is irrevocable – and the consequences deadly. Both a red-hot crime novel of car heists, sex, and rival gangs and a coming of age story of a teenager navigating the costs of the fast life, Young Blood reveals the devastating violence and raw beauty of life in South Africa’s townships.