Kwela Books – förlag

Toe Pattie Peters agt jaar oud is, sterf haar ma. En 'n paar dae later gee haar pa haar weg. Om by haar anties in die Strand te gaan bly. "Dis bieter so," hoor sy hom se. "'n Kind het 'n ma nodig en sy is nog klein. Kitty en Maggie sal sorre virrie kind, daaroor hoef ek my nie te worrie nie." So begin Pattie se afskeid aan haar pa, en aan die Kaap. Uiteindelik beland sy in die Goudstad - by haar sus Dorie in mevrou Soes se losieshuis. Maar dan ontmoet sy Laki Pappasani, 'n Griek van Sparta, ambagsman van beroep. Net jammer dis die sestigerjare, en sy, Pattie Peters, klerk van beroep, is 'n kleurlingmeisie van die Strand.

Drie vriende (in hul veertigs) gaan hou saam vakansie langs die see. En in 'n oogwink verander 'n jare lange standvastige vriendskap in 'n stormagtige moeras. Karien kom vroeer terug huis toe, na sy ontdek haar een beste vriendin het haar man verlei, Daleen kom uiteindelik met die sak patats te vore dat sy eintlik gay is, en net te bang was om haar twee boesemvriendinne met die waarheid te vertrou, en Amelia sit tussen die duiwel en die diep blou see - verlig dat sy eindelik die waarheid oor haar egbreuk vertel het, maar diep hartseer oor die verbrokkeling van 'n kosbare vriendskap.

Emmie, 'n sekretaresse by 'n vooraanstaande privaatskool, word teen haar sin 'n dwelmhandelaar. Dit is net vir drie maande, belowe sy haarself, tot al haar skuld afbetaal is. Maar die dwelmbase is allesbehalwe gretig om haar te laat gaan, want sy het dan daagliks toegang tot soveel dwelmhonger tieners...

Die opvolg op Dis ek, Anna Wat het met Anna gebeur die oomblik na sy die sneller getrek het? Na sy haar stiefpa wat haar soveel jare lank fisies en emosioneel verrinneweer het, vroeg een oggend in Bloemfontein in die oe gekyk, en toe geskiet het? Agt jaar na die verskyning van Dis ek, Anna neem Anchien Troskie aldus Elbie Lotter weer haar pen op, en skryf die opvolg. Hoe vra 'n mens vergifnis, en wanneer mag jy wraak neem? Dit is die vrae waarmee Anna - en ook die skrywer - worstel ...'n Skreiend eerlike roman oor Anna Bruwer se lewe na die moord op haar stiefpa - 'n boek gevul met deernis, en eindelik ook hoop.

What happened to Anna the moment after she pulled the trigger? After she looked her stepfather in the eye, and shot him, the man who sexually abused her and her sister for so many years? Seven years after It's Me, Anna, a publication sensation at the time of its release, the author revisits the story of Anna Bruwer. How does one seek forgiveness for murder? Or is retribution the only way to bring about justice? These are the questions Anna - and the writer - wrestle with.This is an excruciatingly honest depiction of Anna's life after her stepfather's death: a novel filled with compassion, and ultimately hope.

Policewoman Erica van der Linde has perfected the method of keeping people in the witness protection program hidden. She kills them. Nobody looks for former criminals once they turn state witness. But then she is assigned to hide Daniel Enslin, the kind of witness she hadn't encountered before. And suddenly Erica also finds herself in a life-and-death situation because now Daniel knows her secret.

South Africa has one of the highest murder rates in the world, and a femicide rate that is more than five times the world average. In this book, Dr Nechama Brodie looks at the story of femicide in South Africa over the past forty years. She interrogates police, public health and media data, exploring the history of violence against women in an entirely new way that contextualises and challenges the state and public response to what has, in reality, been a crisis for decades.

Mangi and his fiancée, Aza, have been living together in Linden for the past eight years. One day while cleaning their bedroom, Mangi discovers Aza’s secret. The uncovering of Aza's lie is the catalyst to the unravelling of their already tumultuous relationship. When Aza eventually ends their relationship, Mangi is left destitute. Mangi searches for meaning as he makes his way through the streets of Joburg in The City Is Mine.

Luthando Dyasop’s memoir starts with an account of his young life as a black artist in apartheid South Africa. He eventually joins uMkhonto we Sizwe, the banned ANC’s military wing. Soon he falls out of favour with the powers that be and is sent to the Quatro detention centre. After years torture, he is eventually released, when he begins his battle for vindication. Out of Quatro is a story not only about Dyasop’s extraordinary life, but also about a tumultuous time in ANC history.

Azania receives a call to notify her of her estranged father’s death. This call prompts her to go to Knysna to seek answers about his life and the circumstances surrounding his death. Detective Welter is investigating the seemingly straightforward suicide case of former politician Joseph ‘Lefty’ Mafu quickly turns into a complicated web of conspiracies. But the truth is as elusive as whoever is behind it all. If only the dead could talk...

The author's poetry collection attempts to probe the realm of the unsaid and the ripples that move between words, between people, between bodies. Sometimes the verses trace and explore details that have brought the poet to, in her own words, "arrested instants of loss or witness that break open the surface of the world".

The 16th June 2006 was the 30th anniversary of the Soweto youth uprising which marked a turning point in the political struggle for equality in South Africa. This title commemorates the event by featuring interviews with 30 people who were at school during the uprising. The title is structured around different focal points such as - events leading up to 16 June, the day itself, the aftermath of the uprising, the influence and effect it had on the lives of the various interviewees. Private photographs of the interviewees then and now round off the text.

Room 207 is set in and around a dilapitated building in Hillbrow. For more than ten years, six guys live in room 207 of this block of flats - they are Matome, Molamo, Zulu-boy, D'nice, Modishi and the nameless narrator. By day, they are hustlers - they hustle production companies, they have their own music company, they survive. At night, they party, and they're pushing corruption, as the narrator would say. They are conmen, and they are streetwise. By day, and by night, women flock around them. Room 207 is a novel - the prose is dense and some of it reads like poetry. It paints a vivid, engrossing picture of six friends in Hillbrow, and their sense of hopelessness - despair in fact - of having to compromise their lives. They are artists, these men, but they have to make a living. Otherwise, fate would call them back home - not driving their own BMW, but leaving they way they arrived in the 'dream city'. In a taxi, with empty pockets, and nothing to show for their years in Jo'burg.

Mangaliso Zolo is a hapless recent graduate, still living in the southern suburbs of Cape Town near the university. Manga has an office job at a large insurance company, but he is anonymous and overlooked in this vast bureaucracy. Penumbra charts Manga's daily struggles with mental illness and the twin pull, from his many friends and acquaintances, between a reckless drug-fuelled lifestyle and charismatic Christianity. The novel brings an alternative experience of Cape Town to life, one far removed from both the gloss of tourism brochures and the familiar poverty of the Flats. Mahlangu's voice is unlike anything South African literature has yet seen and this debut novel dissects young, urban slackers in South Africa with startling precision.

Mokgethi is not your average teenage girl. Mokgethi dreams of going to Oxford to study Actuarial Science. But her grandmother and aunt have other ideas, and with no one to fight her corner, except for her younger brother Khutso, Mokgethi is forced to realise that her dreams may well turn out to be just that. Dreams. Kgebetli Moele returns with perhaps his most controversial novel to date a novel written from the perspective of a seventeen year old girl. Untitled explores the challenges that face young women trying to escape the poverty into which they have been born Mokgethis life is all about overcoming poor education, escaping sexual predators (young and old) and dealing with the lack of positive role models in her township. In this explosive novel, Moele deals head-on with sexual abuse, rape and poverty in a way that very few South African authors can.

In this, Eskia Mphahleles second autobiography published originally in 1984 he recounts his return to South Africa after twenty years in exile and the challenges that he and his family faced in returning to the land of his birth before the momentous events of the 1990s. Filled with extraordinary, precise prose, Afrika, my music showcases the kind of writing that earned Eskia a nomination for the Nobel Prize for Literature in the year this book was originally published. Eskias commitment to education and to the upliftment of Africans across the continent has never been in doubt, but this autobiography lays bare just what this unwavering focus cost him and his family. On a larger geopolitical level, Africa, my music is a book that charts of the rise and fall of the great and the not-so-good of the African revolutionary movements of the 1960s and 1970s people who Eskia often knew personally.This is not only the biography of a man who fell painfully short of achieving the goals he had set himself as a young man in Marabastad (the Sofiatown of Pretoria), but also the biography of a generation of African thinkers and revolutionaries who achieved so much but whose dreams of a continent remade were never fully realised.

Niq Mhlongo returns with a collection of short stories that cover the span of our democracy: Crime, xenophobia, racism and homophobia, the new black elite, land redistribution, the Zuma presidency. The stories have been published to critical acclaim in France, Germany, Spain, Italy and the USA but remain largely unknown in South Africa. A?ffluenza offers us a chance to savour Niq Mhlongo's take on the madness of the last twenty years.

A collection of new and critically acclaimed stories by award-winning South African author Ken Barris. Here, Barris's work combines everyday events with the surreal and fantastical: the title story centres on a dog called Worm; in another, husband and wife quarrel over a plugless lamp; and in another, a man encounters a speaking baboon in his kitchen. Poised, lyrical and humorous, the stories in this collection concretise the human condition via the author's characteristically unfettered style.

When the love of her life reveals he's been unfaithful to her, life, romance, and everything in-between come crashing down. Suddenly it seems as if Kari du Toit's previous life - one far removed from Bloubergstrand's sandy beaches - is slowly catching up with her. After ten years of silence, she receives a call from her estranged brother. At the foot of Devil's Peak, where burkas are as ordinary as yellow polka-dot bikinis, she once again becomes Karima Essop: daughter, sister, deserter.

Thuli Nhlapo was seven years old when she realised that no one called her by name. Known as "Yellow”, she was bullied at home and at school. Fearing that she had a terrible disease, she withdrew into herself. Years later, Thuli is still haunted by her childhood experiences. She confronts her mother about her real father. Getting no answers, Thuli embarks on years of searching for the truth. In the process, she uncovers unsettling family secrets that irrevocably change all their lives.

Helen Joseph was one of the main organisers in the Women’s March of 9 August 1956. Arrested on a charge of high treason, Helen suffered constant persecution. In this account, Joseph writes about enduring the Treason Trial – one of the longest and most important trials in our history. She shares stories of prison, the daily humiliations, but also their perseverance and small triumphs. Originally banned and unavailable for decades, this book adds to our understanding of South Africa’s history.

On the side of the road two boys are walking. The smaller one does not speak. He sees patterns, though, all around him – in the clouds, stones, arch of the sun. Some say he is cursed, others believe he is magical; his true condition has not been diagnosed. To Ash, Zuko is simply his little brother, all he has left in the world. After having to bury his sister and mother, this teenager on the cusp of manhood is leading his brother to the city to find their father. Will he take them in?

If the apricot trees of Soweto could talk, what stories would they tell? This short story collection provides an imaginative answer as it captures the vibrancy of the township and surrounds. Told with satirical flair, life and death intertwine in these tales where funerals and the ancestors feature strongly; where cemeteries are places to show off a new car and catch up on gossip. Take a seat under the apricot tree and be enthralled by tales both entertaining and thought-provoking.

Nomvuyo Ngcelwane grew up in the heart of District Six. In beautiful detail, she tells of life in a bustling community, and the vibrant atmosphere one has come to associate with District Six. Twenty years since original publication, Ngcelwane’s story is still relevant today and paints a captivating history of black people living in District Six before forced removals took place. She writes with great honesty, warmth, humor and heart.

Lily is making sure her wedding to Owen will be perfect. For one thing, she is seating Owen’s dad from the Cape Flats far from her snobbish parents who keep insinuating that Owen is not good enough for her. But then Owen’s ex Courtney shows up with her teenage daughter, Chiara, who could be his. And Owen seems happy at the prospect of being a dad. What happened to their decision to commit to love and marriage, but not the baby carriage? Is he changing his mind about children, about her?

German South West Africa, 1905. The sickly Siegfried Bock comes to the colony to prove his mettle. But he soon becomes disillusioned. His path crosses that of Lisbeth Lowenstein, a poor Jewess who has to marry a German settler she’s hardly met, the Damara man Mordegai Guruseb, who escaped from a concentration camp, and the pseudoscientist Albert Pitzer. Against the background of the German killing of Hereros, these characters’ fates intertwine and each one’s humanity is severely tested.

Twelve-year-old Ben Aronbach doesn't fit in anywhere. In his small town in the 1980s, he's a Jew among Christian Afrikaners; among Jews, he's the boy from a family of lapsed shul-goers. But when he meets Leo Fein, he thinks he's found his place. Fein, however, has designs on Ben's mother and her modest fortune. As the end of apartheid approaches, Ben is thrust among political fugitives and right-wing extremists in an attempt to save his family and find redemption for his part in their downfall.

Dr Siona O'Connell examines apartheid-era forced removals of the people of Harfield Village, their lives, home, belonging and freedom in the aftermath of apartheid for these residents. David Brown's images form the backdrop of the book: telling stories of what life was like in Harfield and the effects that eviction wreaked and continues to impose on these people. His photographs are echoed in 2018 as a reminder that for many, the past seems to be not only unspeakable, but unthinkable.