Catalyst Press

From Author Jane Kurtz, winner of the School Library Journal Best Of The Year and numerous other awards. 

In verse, Oh Give Me a Home relates the story of a girl’s inside-out view of America as she journeys from Ethiopia, searches for friends and belonging.

Kirkus Starred Review 

Booklist Starred Review

Selected as a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Book. 

In elementary school, Jane knows that Maji, Ethiopia, cool and green, perched on a mountainside of waterfalls and monkeys, is the perfect place to live. Or it would be perfect if she had a pet or a best friend.

Jane is full of ideas that include schemes for an animal to play with. A real pet, not the dik dik that dies, the monkey that tries to bite her fingers, nor the elusive cat that lives in the shed and has just absconded with her litter of kittens. But her plans are derailed as Jane learns she is to move back to America with her family.

America and Africa collide as Jane tries to answer the simple question, “Where am I from?” Entering grade school in suburban America for the first time, will she find a best friend a continent away from her real life in Africa? Or is America–where she meets her relatives for laughter and frolicking and big holiday meals–her real home? 

The epic game begins!

That night, as agreed, the two children ask the moon: “Please let our snowpals play soccer.” Then each child adds a secret wish upon the stars: “I wish that my snowpal wins the soccer match!” 

After the storm and after the children build snowmen comes a whimsical tale. In the light of moon and stars, the snowpals come to life to play an epic game of soccer. A story of joy and the delight of play for all children. A primer in sportsmanship in English and French, this analogue book, illustrated with stitch and seam, harkens back to an era before the uniformity of computer generated illustrations.

An epic story of espionage, love and sacrifice. 

In 1970s Ethiopia, 13-year-old Elen, determined to escape her arranged marriage, secretly abandons her tiny village hoping to find her aunt living in Asmara, the capital of Eritrea. Meanwhile, Girmai escapes his abusive stepmother after the death of his beloved father, only to end up homeless and starving on the streets of the city. Overcoming the odds, Elen and Girmai both grow up to be successful business owners, each with their own lives and families

When the Derg regime overthrows the government, they turn Asmara into a nightmare of roaming bands of soldiers, who torture and kill civilians with impunity. Refusing to accept the injustice and mass killings of the Red Terror campaign, Elen and Girmai join the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front's (EPLF) underground network to fight for freedom.

The stakes rise as the horror of Derg-sanctioned torture leaks out of dissident detention centers. Elen and Girmai struggle to maintain their precarious fight for justice and a growing passion for each other. As they fall in love, they are faced with impossible choices, tragedy, and heroism in a cause much bigger than their own lives.

Based on a true story, Born at the End of the World is a powerful narrative of patriotism, love, camaraderie, and courage, no less uplifting or appalling than Schindler's List.

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.

• 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.

Puncturing the heart of Apartheid South Africa — the story of an extraordinary woman, mother, and activist. 

In 1959, a South African Native Commissioner under police escort travelled to Paarl, a small, multi-racial community outside Cape Town to present banning orders to Elizabeth Mafeking—a recognized African women’s leader and trade union president. The directive instructed the married mother of eleven to leave all but one of her children—a nursing infant—behind in Paarl and submit to a banning order that would send her more than 600 miles away from her home of 22 years. In the ultimate act of defiance, Mafeking escaped her escort on the day her banning went into effect and fled the country for a life in exile, and One Day We Are Going Home is the story of one woman's struggle to redeem her cause, her family, and herself in a long-awaited triumph over Apartheid.

From Author Jane Kurtz, winner of the School Library Journal Best Of The Year and numerous other awards. 

In verse, Oh Give Me a Home relates the story of a girl’s inside-out view of America as she journeys from Ethiopia, searches for friends and belonging.

Kirkus Starred Review 

Booklist Starred Review

Selected as a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Book. 

In elementary school, Jane knows that Maji, Ethiopia, cool and green, perched on a mountainside of waterfalls and monkeys, is the perfect place to live. Or it would be perfect if she had a pet or a best friend.

Jane is full of ideas that include schemes for an animal to play with. A real pet, not the dik dik that dies, the monkey that tries to bite her fingers, nor the elusive cat that lives in the shed and has just absconded with her litter of kittens. But her plans are derailed as Jane learns she is to move back to America with her family.

America and Africa collide as Jane tries to answer the simple question, “Where am I from?” Entering grade school in suburban America for the first time, will she find a best friend a continent away from her real life in Africa? Or is America–where she meets her relatives for laughter and frolicking and big holiday meals–her real home? 

When your best friend is moving a continent away, the last hurrah has to be epic. Rufus and Xandr are sneaking away during the holidays but as crazy as their plan is, it won’t ever approach the reality that is about to hit them.

“What does the end look like? Like that black and orange cloud on the horizon coming closer each day? What I do know, however, without a shadow of doubt, is that this whole thing was a bad idea. Stuck in the middle of freaking nowhere without any means of transport, enough food, or the faintest idea of what’s going on.”

Rufus and Xandr have known each other forever. To call them best friends is an understatement. However, Rufus’s dad decided that his family must emigrate. As these two best friends prepare to wave each other farewell, they plan one last adventure together . . .

From the sunlit courtyard of her family home in Mogadishu to the icy streets of Minneapolis, Life, Interrupted is a deeply personal memoir about migration, motherhood, and the enduring influence of a father’s love.

Raised in a close-knit, multigenerational Somali household, Sahra was shaped early by tradition and by the towering presence of her father, Noor. His voice, his choices, and his values became the compass by which she learned to navigate the world. But when she arrived in the United States as a teenager, everything shifted. As she built a life in America on her own terms, she examined how her father’s hopes and expectations both shaped and confined her and how the love between them, though complex, endured through every chapter of her life. 

Told with fierce honesty, emotional clarity, and quiet resilience, Life, Interrupted is a memoir for anyone who has ever straddled two cultures, two generations, or two selves and searched for belonging in the in-between.

A narrative of enslavement, a satire on colonialism, and a court battle for justice by those tortured and detained during the fight for independence from colonial rule: three comics depict key moments in African history. 

Three unique narratives depicted in comic-book form introduce readers to African historical narratives. In one, readers are offered a translation of a short story, turned into a comic, that satirizes the colonization of Africa by depicting Europeans as cats and Africans as mice. The cats wish to feast on the mice and so create an elaborate ruse by proclaiming that they can turn the inferior mice into cats via education and medication, a ruse that is finally discovered by the mice, who rise up against the cats. In a second, readers are offered a deconstruction of a slave narrative, The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano. Several historians weigh in to evaluate the memoirs of Olaudah Equiana and decipher whether his claims are true or false; nevertheless, despite some problematic aspects of his narrative and questions that remain as to its veracity, the effect it had on the abolitionist movement is without question. And finally, the third comic details how ordinary Kenyans who had been tortured and abused by the British government during the Kenyan fight for independent from colonial rule were able to obtain justice, decades later, from a British court of law. 

An apparition of his deceased mother appears to law professor, Salim Bardien, in New York on the same day that a massive student protest movement erupts in Cape Town. She comes to foretell a revelation, an invisible stain for him to clean. The news itself—that Salim’s birth was the product of his mother’s illicit affair with a white politician in 1960s South Africa—comes from a newly found half-sister, Bertha. Yet more disorder follows when Bertha reveals that their brother is dying of cancer, and that Salim’s bone marrow may be the only hope of saving him.

How can one secret alter—or even redeem—a life? How strong are familial bonds across distances and generations? And how do the struggles of another era echo those of today? As Salim, now a husband and father, wrestles with these questions in the present, his mother Sawligha’s forbidden love story unfolds in the past.

Set between New York and Cape Town—across eras spanning apartheid’s forced removals and the rise of Black Lives Matter—and moving through lives, deaths, and the liminal spaces between, Mother/Land is the story of family, and of the world we inherit from those that came before us.

As children growing up at Marchbanks, an imposing mansion built high on a hill above a Cape seaside town, Bird and her five siblings love to hear the story of how their father wooed their mother, but they don’t know much about the past of their reclusive grandmother, Ma Bess, who rules Marchbanks from its shadows and keeps her stories firmly locked in her cold heart. 

When Bird’s ten-year-old twin brothers Oliver and Oscar go missing after a day of fishing, Bird appoints herself the family scribe and begins writing to the brothers she refuses to believe are gone for good. The elderly Ma Bess may be the voice in command at Marchbanks, but Bird, the youngest in the family, becomes its all-seeing eye. If Bird learns the truth, though, can life at Marchbanks ever be the same? 

Against the backdrop of complicated, beautiful South Africa in the 1960s, an epic family saga unfolds.

Eve Hunter has grown up on her family's dairy farm in the Lowveld, but she's inherited more than just a love of the land—she's inherited their sorrow. When her father is electrocuted while building a barn, the tragedy exposes the dark secret that has run beneath her family's sadness for years. Eve turns to Jack, her closest friend and neighbor, for comfort.

But Jack belongs to Kate, her older sister, at least that's what their families have always assumed. As Eve and Jack's bond deepens into something more charged, Eve faces an impossible choice to either honor her family’s expectations or to follow her heart and risk everything.

Then Kate comes to her with a devastating request that could change everything between them.

The Light Remains is a story about the weight of family loyalty, the price of independence, and the choices that define us when duty and desire collide.

The magical Council of Aunties are the only ones who can decide if Max and Meera can adopt a baby of their very own. 

To prove they can become parents, Max and Meera must complete three challenges–collect enough joy, love, and hope for the Aunties. Each task seems overwhelming, but a child is waiting, and they are determined to be ready, too.

Everyday Magic is inspired by the adoption process, and recreates it in this fairytale, about what it means to build a family. 

Dark clouds roll in as thunder rumbles through the streets of a small town. Two children team up with town locals in a rhythmic race against the rain, rushing to make it home before the downpour begins. But when they’re just a moment too slow, the storm catches up—snapping the stoplight and leaving everyone stranded in the heart of town. In a surprising twist, an unexpected hero swoops in, guiding traffic safely through the chaos with the grace of a conductor leading a community concerto!

Beat the Rain is a colorful and whimsical children’s read-aloud book that captures the vibrant culture and charm of daily life through rhythm, repetition, and onomatopoeia. 

In the heart of Zululand, the mystery of a missing young woman is lost in the shadow of iSandlwana, the lion shaped mountain that looms over the residence of the valley captured in the vortex of past legends rising from the piled rock monuments guarding the bones of Zulu and British Soldiers killed in the colonial war. 

When the body of a young woman, presumed to be the beautiful Sam Webster, appears briefly on the banks of the flooded Buffalo River, the writer Daniel Hawthorne decides to visit the Websters’ luxury lodge perched at the edge of an old battlefield. Under the guise of researching a new novel about his disgraced ancestor, the lepidopterist Lieutenant Charles Hawthorne, who fought in the Battle of iSandlwana, Daniel starts to investigate the reasons for Sam’s disappearance. The lines between loyalty and betrayal, love and hate, cowardice and courage, redemption and shame, soon become blurred as Daniel gets closer to the truth. 

Written in Craig Higginson’s masterful prose, Shadow Country is at once a war novel, a murder mystery, a multi-layered love story and a robust reassertion of what it is to remain human during the most challenging times.

Chasing Ghost concludes the Catalyst International Crime Duology started in Phantom Pass as a killing spawns a hunt through a tangled web of drug gangs, political intrigue, and old apartheid mysteries that criss-crosses southern Africa.

As clues smolder on the freeway of Cape Town, Captain Josh Holland and Colonel Gavin Whitall of the SAPS Serious Crimes Unit in George, South Africa are sucked into a dangerous world of corruption overseen by politically appointed leadership as they search for the killer who left a prominent lawyer mutilated and floating in a small row boat on the tranquil waters of the Knysna estuary on South Africa’s southern tip. As Josh and Gavin dig into the victim's past, the body count rises while tantalizing clues from the war in apartheid South Africa point to old hatreds and past murders as potential instigators of the whirlwind of violence the detectives find themselves in. The sprint is on to prevent more killings even while careers and lives are threatened by powerful people and bureaucratic deceit in this twisting and relentless conclusion to Phantom Pass.

The Knysna Murder Duology explores the intricate thought process of solving a murder while navigating the modern reality of politicized policing.

Nestled in the shadow of the majestic Drakensberg Mountains lies Woodwright Manor, a magnificent family estate. Yet beneath Woodwright’s faded grandeur, mystery—and danger—lurks.

When sixteen-year-old Peter Brewer’s unconventional great-aunt Patricia—one of the last heirs to the once-wealthy Woodwright family—passes away at the age of 105, Peter’s family travels to Patricia’s mansion for her funeral. Thrown into the hothouse of old feuds and eccentric characters, Peter finds himself drawn into the web of family secrets surrounding Patricia’s inheritance. Rumors swirl of a hidden fortune, and Peter’s curiosity grows with each obscure conversation he overhears. When Peter and his new friend Larissa find Patricia’s cryptic love letters to a young man, written decades before, they set out to uncover the hidden truths about Patricia's legacy—and how her secrets may still haunt the Woodwright family. 

Falling for Larissa, Peter can't help wondering if he is doomed to torpedo this relationship because of his own foibles. As Peter is pulled deeper into Patricia’s long-buried past, he starts to realize that others at the funeral might have their own hidden agendas ... and seeking to uncover the truth may put him and Larissa in danger of getting in their way.

Mason O’Connor’s suspenseful Manor of Buried Secrets is a gripping journey of mystery, friendship, passion, and the search for buried treasure.

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.

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.

The giant couldn’t believe it. He had found the perfect Olive. So round, so shiny, so black—he must show all of his friends! So starts the journey of The Giant as he runs to share his happiness with everyone and the sorrow and joy that grows from his jubilation. 

Leo Daly, the son of iconic South African illustrator and writer Niki Daly, re-imagines the universal tale of loss, grief, and the joy of new beginnings. A simple but empathetic story borne from the pain and loss of a miscarriage, this big-hearted, humorous story of a tall Giant in love with a little Olive examines our loves, passions, and the destruction of loss. A breath of fresh air that unflinchingly tackles our greatest fear. 

Like Where the Wild Things Are or Frog and Toad, A Lost Button, The Giant and the Olive tackles our fears and triumphs with humor and grace. A tale for any age from the kindergartner to the octogenarian.

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.

Across countries and decades, The Wanderers weaves a captivating tapestry of human lives, exploring the enduring—and sometimes contradictory—duties of blood and country.

Ruru’s father, a South African freedom fighter, was exiled to Tanzania before she was born, leaving Ruru and her mother to fend for themselves in the township they called home. So when a fatal bus accident claims her mother’s life, Ruru is adrift.

Haunted by her mother’s absence, another loss sits heavy on Ruru’s heart: that of her father, who never returned to the family, or country, he claimed to love. When she learns of his passing, Ruru grieves for the man she never knew, and the answers she would never find.

She seeks solace in Tanzania, where she strikes up an unlikely friendship with her father’s widow, a Rwandan refugee named Efuoa. Efuoa gifts Ruru her father’s journals, and as she reads, she begins to piece together the fragments of a complicated life of deep love, shifting identity, small triumphs and haunting disappointments.

"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.

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.

Includes Caroline Kurtz’s award-winning memoir A Road Called Down on Both Sides, Winner of the Presbyterian Writers Guild’s Best First Book Award, and her follow-up memoir Today is Tomorrow 

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 two award-winning teams of South African artists, writers and animators, these middle grade fantasy graphic novels take readers on an adventure to the fabled waters of Africa, where ancient creatures slumber in the deep and two powerful young women must discover their destinies. 

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.

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.

Librarian Favorites: Third to Fifth Grade

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

By 1996, millions of South Sudanese have been killed, died of starvation, or fled the decades-long civil war ravaging their country. So when the Presbyterian Church in the United States begins recruiting a development team to work with war refugees in the region, Caroline and her husband Mark are eager to help. But it’s only months before ghosts from their individual pasts whistle in to disrupt their marriage and their new postings.

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.

Including 2022 Caine Prize winning story "Five Years Next Sunday" by Idza Luhumyo, 2022 Nommo Award shortlisted story "Shelter" by Mzobi Haimbe and 2023 O'Henry Prize for Short Fiction winner "Mother" by Jacob M'hango

 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.

Madame Livingstone is based on the true story of the unlikely partnership between a Belgian and an African who were responsible for the sinking of a German battleship in the Congo during the First World War. Aviator Gaston Mercier, lieutenant in the Royal Belgian Army, arrives at Lake Tanganyika, Congo in 1915 on orders to sink a critical German warship, the Graf Von Götzen. To find out the ship’s exact position, he is assigned a guide, an enigmatic, mixed-race African and the supposed son of the famous explorer David Livingstone who is nicknamed “Mrs. Livingstone” for the Scottish kilt he wears. Little by little, while the war between Belgian and German colonial powers rages on and the pair hunt down the Graf Von Götzen, the young Belgian pilot learns more about the land around him from Mrs. Livingstone and discovers the irrevocable and tragic effects of colonialism on the local people. A historical fiction story of adventure and friendship against the backdrop of World War I in Africa, Madame Livingstone was originally published in France by Glénat in 2014. The graphic novel is authored by historian and comics specialist Christophe Cassiau-Haurie and Congo's unique beauty is presented in full color illustrations by beloved Congolese artist Barly Baruti.

"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

As Imogen Zula Nyoni, aka Genie, lies in a coma at Mater Dei Hospital after having suffered through a long illness, her family and friends struggle to come to terms with her impending death. This is the story of Genie, who has gifts that transcend time and space. It is also the story of her forebears - Baines Tikiti, who, because of his wanderlust, changed his name and ended up walking into the Indian Ocean; his son, Livingstone Stanley Tikiti, who, during the war, took as his nom de guerre Golide Gumede and who became obsessed with flight; and Golide's wife, Elizabeth Nyoni, a country-and-western singer self-styled after Dolly Parton, blonde wig and all. 

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.

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.

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
• 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

From award winning children’s writer Niki Daly, author and illustrator of the Lolo early reader series

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.

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.

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. 

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 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.

Sixteen-year-old Ebba den Eeden is dealing with all the typical teenage things: first boyfriends, mean girls, overbearing aunts – and, of course, navigating the political schemes of a murderous dictator, running a farm to feed an entire city, preventing the genocide of 2,000 teenagers trapped inside South Africa’s famous Table Mountain, and saving the world from another apocalypse by reuniting four ancient amulets with the help of her ghostly ancestors. Just another day for a den Eeden! In The Thousand Steps, we met Ebba, a red-headed mixed-race teen with a mysterious birthmark who spent sixteen years underground when nuclear war caused massive sea level rise and flooded her home city of Cape Town. Now a second apocalypse is on the way, and according to an old family prophecy, Ebba is the only one with power to stop it. With Hal imprisoned, the Colony running out of food, Micah off leading the Resistance with a gorgeous new sidekick, and the Second “Calamity” only days away, Ebba must listen to her instincts, even if it means destroying the things she holds most dear. Who can she trust to help take down General de Groot and find the missing amulets – and who will betray her? In the second installment of Helen Brain’s Fiery Spiral trilogy, Ebba will learn the impossible decisions – and great sacrifice – that sometimes come with destiny. A dystopian fantasy that plays out on the shores of South Africa, for lovers of Akata Witch and Children of Blood and Bone.

PRAISE FOR THE FIERY SPIRAL BOOK ONE

“This novel will draw readers in with its high stakes and well-developed characters. […] A strong, character-driven work recommended for readers looking for dystopian fantasy with a social justice bent.” - School Library Journal

“A deftly crafted, impressively original, and inherently entertaining novel […]. The Thousand Steps will prove to be an enduringly popular addition to any high school or community library YA Fiction collection.” - Midwest Book Review

“Mixing mythology with real historical atrocities like apartheid, this is a solid tale featuring diverse characters who reflect the real-world communities of South Africa” —Kirkus Reviews

A Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection

A 2024 Skipping Stones Honor Award winner 

Winner of The Next Generation Indie Book Award 

A Nile Book Award nominee for the White Nile 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.

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.

From 2022 Windham Campbell Prize winner Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu

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

Set in a southern African country that is never named, this powerful tale of human fallibility—told with empathy, generosity, and a light touch—is an excursion into the interiority of the colonizer.

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.

Ruthless underworld criminal Rocco Robano’s group of right wing fanatics, inspired by crazed evangelist Heinz Dieter, are responsible for mayhem and murder in the city of Cape Town. As they prepare to leave for their new home, Aurora, a protected community where the White Brothers, the Core, will live out their days in solidarity, they run amok in the city already cursed by xenophobia.

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.

A 2024 IBBY Honour List Selection 

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.

Eight Hours. Minute by Minute.

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.

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!

The final installment in Peter Church's Dark Web Trilogy

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

Amid rumors of bartenders paid to spike drinks and then deliver drugged college women to paying, eager patrons, University of Cape Town (UCT) authorities move quickly to limit the damage—but the police don’t want to believe there is a problem. A world away in Seattle, Carlos De Palma, the shadowy operator behind Dark Video, is plotting his survival strategy in the ever-changing Internet landscape. With his wealthy clientele clamoring for heightened thrills, Carlos begins tapping into a new service that blurs the boundaries between the real and virtual worlds. Meanwhile, UCT student Robbie is sent into a sinister underground world where no price is too high to pay to deliver every fantasy—no matter how twisted.

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.

• 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

Outside the Lines is a journey through the underbelly of Johannesburg, South Africa and the intimacy of family drama scattered across racial, religious, and class divisions. Drug addict Cathleen is kidnapped and her distracted, middle-class family fails to notice her absence; Zilindile, who services Cathleen’s drug habit, and his Muslim Indian girlfriend Farhana, struggle to make sense of their relationship despite their very different backgrounds; and domestic worker Flora and the silent Runyararo, who was painting Cathleen’s house until accused by Cathleen’s father of stealing, become entangled with romance and criminals, leading to the ultimate tragedy. A taut novel that walks the line between family drama, crime novel, thriller, and black comedy.

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 Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection

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.

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.

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.

On the brink of execution, 16 year old Ebba den Eeden is unexpectedly elevated from the bunker deep in South Africa's Table Mountain where she has lived all her life, believing--as do all the other teenagers who toil daily to make their food and power the bunker--that the world "Above" is uninhabitable due to a nuclear holocaust. Instead, she is heiress to a massive fortune—one that everyone wants to control. While dealing with the machinations of the High Priest, his handsome son Hal, and the rules and regulations of a society and religion she doesn't understand, she must also try to save her three friends, still stuck in the bunker and facing execution any day.

The second installment in Peter Church's Dark Web Trilogy

A minibus taxi flipping spectacularly on its head; two teenagers engaged in forbidden sex in a shopping-mall rest room; a raunchy table dance in a Cape Town strip club. How are these scenes connected to a beautiful young woman running through a forest near the university early on a Sunday morning?

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.

Winner of the Presbyterian Writers Guild’s Best First Book AwardComing of age in 1950s Ethiopia, American Caroline Kurtz returns as an adult with spouse and family, searching for "home.”

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 2022 Skipping Stones Honor Awardee
Named a Best Middle-Grade Book of 2020 by Kirkus Reviews
2021 Outstanding International Books List, United States Board on Books for Young People

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.

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.

Ahmed Ismail Yusuf has lived in Minneapolis since fleeing Somalia in the late 80s. He did not speak English when he arrived, he was a high-school dropout, and he was not sure what his actual age was. Today he has two college degrees and is the author of Somalis in Minnesota, published by the Minnesota Historical Society Press. In 2017, The History Theatre of St. Paul, Minnesota produced his short play, “A Crack in the Sky,” a memoir about how Yusuf found inspiration in Maya Angelou and Muhammad Ali during his early days as an immigrant to the U.S.

• 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

Wandering in Cape Town, Leke stalks people, steals small objects, and visits doctors and healers in search of a cure. But he isn't sure what ails him--loneliness, or the family curse.

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.

Winner of the 2017 German Crime Fiction Prize

Moses wants one thing: to get home, where his girlfriend and a cold beer are waiting for him. But his car breaks down on an empty street, not a single human being in sight. Moses slips into The Pines, a gated community, in hopes to find help from a university classmate who lives there. Over there, in the “white” world, everything seems calm, orderly, safe. But once inside, he feels like more of an outsider than ever. And he makes a terrible mistake.

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.

The first book in Peter Church's Dark Web Trilogy

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

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.

"[E]ach story inventively unfurls a different desire, longing, or frustration" — Jacinda Townsend, author Saint Monkey

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.

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 dark, intriguing, and satisfying tale with strong characters.

--Kirkus (Starred Review)

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.

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.