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Arriving from high society England to rural South Africa in the turbulent 1960s, Rosemary Smith is out of her depth. But when faced with the startling reality of her new home, Rosemary joins the Black Sash—the white women-led anti-Apartheid organization of which she would one day become national vice president—thrusting her into the interior workings of a country struggling violently towards democracy.

Pulled from her journals charting decades of justice work, this emotional and engrossing memoir is a reexamination of the ally, a rare insight into South Africa’s democratic transition, and the inspiring true story of a community of women who set a new standard for civic responsibility and quietly changed the landscape of an entire nation.

Getting out of Europe is the only thing on Volker’s mind when he buys a one-way ticket to Africa. The 24-hour layover is less than ideal.

Stuck in Charles de Gaulle airport, Volker waits, thinks, and observes. Around him, a strange cast of actors moves across the stage: a porn star, a child trafficker, a terrorist with dwarfism, a trans woman, a pedophile, a disgraced professor. As he walks the terminal, Volker contemplates their fates, his own, and the fate of the lover he left behind.

Innovative and subversive, rich with humor and wit, Will, the Passenger Delaying Flight flips the novel form inside out to expose the messy, dreamlike quality of transient spaces—and to memorialize with awe and reverence the people who move us and move past us with nothing but a glance.

This meticulously researched, fictionalized account of well-known American writers Paul and Jane Bowles peeks behind the curtain of their expatriate life in 1940s Morocco.

In self-imposed exile and free from the moralistic constraints of the West, Paul and Jane wrote, fought, and loved feverishly, both each other and others of all sexes. The passion, envy, and exuberance that defined their unconventional marriage thrived in sharp contrast to a country straining for independence under the thumb of its colonial keepers.

Told by Paul, Jane, and Belaquassim, Paul’s young Moroccan lover, In Tangier, We Killed the Blue Parrot is a study of contrasts—in the exotic, the erotic, the political, and the creative life.

In the Shadows of the Springs I Saw is a masterclass in multimedia and a testimony to the enduring spaces that bear the burden of history.

Thirty miles east of Johannesburg, the town of Springs, South Africa boasts the second largest collection of Art Deco buildings in the world. From a prosperous gold mining era in the 1920s and ‘30s, through the forced removals of entire communities during Apartheid, and now in a time of revival—these buildings stood sentinel over it all.

In a series of photo essays, fictional monologues, and poems, Barbara Adair reimagines the architectural monograph to explore a city in liminal space, where legacies of decay and restoration, somber remembrance and celebration, violent exclusion and vibrant integration can be felt on every street corner.

“A woman born in South Africa has a greater chance of being raped than learning how to read.”

So begins Michelle Hattingh’s presentation for her Psychology honors thesis. For years, she has studied the perception of rape victims in her home city of Cape Town, one of the world’s capitals of gender-based violence. But on the night she receives her degree, Michelle and a friend are raped on the beach.

Despite the support from her loving middle-class family and many resources at her disposal, Michelle’s identity is eclipsed by the horrors of that night. By the taint she feels. By the fallout of friendships and jobs, and her harrowing treatment from police and doctors.

I’m The Girl Who Was Raped is Michelle’s reclamation of body, selfhood, and future. This urgent and myth-shattering debut memoir is the battle cry of a survivor—and an invitation to look beyond statistics to the women, daughters, friends, artists, and leaders who refuse to let abusers define them.

You could breathe in Yeoville. #11;Set in vibrant, edgy Yeoville during late 1980s, early 1990s Johannesburg, the stories in Looking for Trouble capture a moment when everything in South Africa was about to change. Colleen Higgs presents love stories without sentiment, relationships explored through the small, broken things that reveal everything. In "Plumbing: A Short History," a woman recounts her relationships through the metaphor of the dripping faucet that all the men in her life tried to fix. In "Looking for Trouble," the collection's signature story, a woman recounts the unraveling of her situationship that ultimately leads to violence and to her question about how she arrived there. These intimate portraits explore the complexities of urban life in a grey area, both literally and figuratively, where filmmakers, musicians, and activists mingle in flats with faulty plumbing and hearts full of longing. With sharp wit and brutal honesty, Higgs reveals the gap between how we imagine our lives and how we actually live them. In a time and place where everyone you sleep with has slept with someone you know, these stories examine the particular intensity of being young when the personal and political intersect. Looking for Trouble is both a love letter to a vanished Johannesburg and a clear-eyed examination of being human.

“I am a woman, and if there’s one thing I know, I have the strength that comes to all of us in our darkest hour."

An eighty-five-year-old woman tracks a rogue stallion through the bush. A musician contemplates death the night before her big break. A prostitute learns everything about a man from the way he walks behind her. A mother leaves her war-torn home to seek safety for her daughter. A winemaker sends her young son into the night in search of help. A girl begs for bread.

In ten mesmerizing stories set primarily in South Africa, Sally Cranswick explores the resourcefulness and resilience that is inheritance to all women. With adept observation and haunting lyricism, Cranswick zooms in close and refuses to look away—exposing truths we will each recognize in our bones.

In smoky newsrooms and idyllic suburbs, the fate of a nation takes course.

With 39 interlinked stories, journalist Jo-Ann Bekker charts South Africa’s turbulent history through the eyes of Rip—child, adult, mother, reporter, betrayer and betrayed—from the dark days of Apartheid through fledgling democracy. From political assassinations to the loss of childhood innocence, to questions of complicity and reparation, these vignettes explore the everyday lives that carried on within—and despite—a country in turmoil.

An anthropological treasure with excruciating relevancy, Asleep Awake Asleep asks the question of how citizens of a nation must adapt in an age of government corruption, power discrepancies, and racial violence.

"Such a cute baby, where did you get her?"

"This is such a good thing you are doing."

"My friends were lucky, they got a white baby."

Born in Germany in the 1960s to war-traumatized parents, Martina Dahlmanns grew up in middle class suburbia, surrounded by loaded silences and unacknowledged prejudice. But she believes she's left those prejudices behind when, in her thirties, she moves to South Africa and becomes the adoptive mother of three black children.

Unable to answer increasingly difficult questions from her eldest, Lele, Martina turns to a community dialogue group. There, she meets Tumi Jonas-Mpofu, a young black woman from Gugulethu, whose friendship will define Martina's life and force her to reckon with the enduring impact of her privilege.

This timely and deeply personal memoir is a celebration of chosen family--but beyond that, it is an acute examination of the legacy of racism in adoption.