First published in South Africa by Zebra Press, an imprint of Random House Struik (Pty) Ltd, c2012.

In 1999 Andrew Brown donned the uniform of the new South African Police Service as a rookie reservist, after years of viewing the police as the enemy. This book documents his experiences over nearly a decade, offering a glimpse into the day-to-day life of a police officer on the beat in one of the most crime-ridden societies in the world. Street Blues takes the reader from high-octane car chases and drug busts to the gritty world of gangsterism and prostitution. It covers issues as diverse as hijacking and petty theft, traffic collisions and firefighting. Brown explores the stresses and complexities of police work, the fear and frustration, as well as the camaraderie and courage. Shifting between tragedy and humour, this book gives personal insight into a perilous and sometimes shocking world that affects us all. Written from direct experience rather than distanced observation, Street Blues is a must-read for anyone concerned with crime and policing in South Africa.

From the moment he sees the beautiful Selena in the seminary grounds, the gates of Melchior’s world are thrown open to love and pain. A Hutu priest, Melchior’s love for the Tutsi woman is forbidden by his church, and stands in opposition to the ethnic hatred that will tear Rwanda apart in the 1994 genocide. In the eyes of the Hutu extremists, such as his childhood friend Victor, she is nothing but a cockroach - an inyenzi - that must be crushed. In the chilling events leading up to the killing spree, the fates of the three characters become increasingly intertwined, and childhood bonds, love, faith and self-sacrifice are pushed to the limit. Heartbreaking, riveting and powerful, Inyenzi captures the innocence of first love, the beauty of Rwanda and the horror of the genocide in a stirring narrative that will be remembered long after the final page has been read.

This book shows how South African writing can help us to understand change after apartheid. It aims to shift the attention of literary criticism away from a narrow set of highbrow South African authors and towards a wider range of texts, including popular fiction. The object of analysis, at its largest level, is the South African polity as it veered between the hopeful optimism of the 'Rainbow nation' under Nelson Mandela, the murderous muddling of Thabo Mbeki, and the 'captured state' under Jacob Zuma. Questions of a political, economic, and sociological cast are central, with changes in the workplace, land reform, indigenous knowledge, xenophobia, corruption, and crime providing specific points of focus. Writing, Politics and Change in South Africa after Apartheid shows how creative literature of the post-apartheid period has a unique and powerful capacity to illuminate these issues and to intervene in our understanding of them.

The body of a Muslim boy is found in a synagogue, mutilated in what looks like a ritual sacrifice, and Inspector Eberard Februarie is called in to solve the case. As news of the murder quickly becomes public, a storm of religious violence threatens to engulf Cape Town. Eberard, however, suspects that the case is not as clear cut as it seems. But can he prove this before the storm breaks? In his investigation, Eberard must steer between Islamist agitators determined to spread unrest, shady security agents trying to trip him up, and a powerful church pastor intent on exploiting the situation for his own purposes. The story moves swiftly from forensic laboratory to drug house, from church office to street demonstration, as the case takes unpredictable and violent twists. A gripping novel with an unstoppable plot, Solace exposes the religious tensions that threaten to tear society apart.

From the outset, South Africa's history has been marked by division and conflict along racial and ethnic lines. From 1948 until 1994, this division was formalized in the National Party's policy of apartheid. Because apartheid intruded on every aspect of private and public life, South African literature was preoccupied with the politics of race and social engineering. Since the release from prison of Nelson Mandela in 1990, South Africa has been a new nation-in-the-making, inspired by a nonracial idealism yet beset by poverty and violence. South African writers have responded in various ways to Njabulo Ndebele's call to "rediscover the ordinary." The result has been a kaleidoscope of texts in which evolving cultural forms and modes of identity are rearticulated and explored. An invaluable guide for general readers as well as scholars of African literary history, this comprehensive text celebrates the multiple traditions and exciting future of the South African voice. Although the South African Constitution of 1994 recognizes no fewer than eleven official languages, English has remained the country's literary lingua franca. This book offers a narrative overview of South African literary production in English from 1945 to the postapartheid present. An introduction identifies the most interesting and noteworthy writing from the period. Alphabetical entries provide accurate and objective information on genres and writers. An appendix lists essential authors published before 1945.

A rediscovered poetry collection from a lost voice of the Holocaust Revealing an artist of remarkable talent and enduring hope, this collection of poetry will join Anne Frank's diary as a touching reminder of what the world has lost by a life cut short. The poems written by Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger are astonishing for their beauty; it is equally astonishing that they have survived at all. Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger was born in Czernowitz, Romania, now Chernivtsi, Ukraine. Czernowitz, known for its vibrant mix of languages and ethnicities, was famously described by Selma's cousin, poet Paul Celan, as a city "where human beings and books used to live." Her childhood friends speak of Selma's liveliness and irreverence, her sparkling and mischievous personality, her charming, careless appearance, and her independence. Selma was passionate about ideas, literature, music, and art. As the storm of hatred gripping Europe broke in earnest, Selma expressed her desires and fears in poetry. Between the ages of fifteen and seventeen, Selma wrote fifty-two poems and five translations—two from French, two from Yiddish, one from Romanian—that are published here. Selma's verse addressed the longings of a young woman in love; in equal measure, it confronted the incomprehensible violence engulfing Europe. Selma found beauty in the fragility of chestnuts, comfort in the loneliness of rain, grief in rural poverty, and, with despairing courage, faced a diminishing and terrifying future. Selma grew up during a time of rising anti-Semitic and nationalist sentiments. When the Germans and their Romanian allies entered Czernowitz in 1941, Jews faced the brutality associated with fascism: a cruelty that would have preferred that she--and her entire history and culture--be erased. After being quarantined to a ghetto in October, 1941, Jewish Romanians were deported to work camps by Romanian officials. In July of 1942, Selma and her family were sent to Michailowka, a labor camp in Ukraine, where they worked as slaves in unspeakable conditions. Remarkably, some records of Selma's experience have survived; because of them, we know that even in the camp Selma held the beauty of language in her heart along with an aching desire to return to her home. Selma's last piece of writing, a letter to her dear friend, Renee Abramvici-Michaeli, is a record of Selma's abiding courage and her bleak hope that a better world would follow. Selma died of typhus on December 16, 1942, her death reported in the diary of an artist who was with Selma in the labor camp. She was only eighteen. Selma left behind a powerful trace of her life and world in this poetry album. The album's survival is a story in itself. Selma gave the album to Renee to give to Selma's friend Leiser Fichman. Leiser passed the album on to Abramovici-Michaeli before he died when his boat to Palestine was torpedoed and sank. Renee Abramovici-Michaeli traveled to Israel across rivers, mountains, and political borders, losing every piece of luggage except for the backpack that held Selma's album. The album then remained with Renee for thirty years, until Czernowitzers in Israel and family abroad financed a private publication. Selma's work first reached a broader audience, however, after Paul Celan insisted that Selma's "Poem" be printed next to his piece in a 1968 German anthology. An interested journalist, after traveling to Israel to see if he could find out more, brought the poems back to Germany, where the first edition was published in 1980. Now, in this first English translation, Selma's life and her magnificent album can reach out to a new audience that seeks a fuller picture of what was lost. A rich introduction explains the historical context and the story of Selma's life. That these poems exist is stunning enough; that they are as touching and universal as they are is a revelation.

After a secret drone strike on a civilian target in South Sudan, RAF air marshal George Bartholomew discovers that a piece of shrapnel traceable back to a British Reaper has been left behind at the scene. He will do anything to get it back, but he is not the only one. Dissatisfied with his life and ousted from the marital bed, Associate Professor Gabriel Cockburn, an ambitious botanist at Bristol University, sets out to South Sudan in pursuit of a rare plant that is crucial to his research. Once there, he finds himself caught up in the travails of a young Sudanese woman, Alek, who agrees to guide him through dangerous territory to find the plant. But Alek has an agenda of her own. As events move beyond their control, the lives of these characters are thrown together, with explosive results. A political thriller that spans the globe, from the halls of Bristol University and London’s secretive MI6 building to the dusty streets of Juba and the refugee camps in war-torn South Sudan, Devil’s Harvest exposes the dark truths of the international arms trade and the plight of the world’s newest country.

This new book by the well-known anthropologists Jean and John L. Comaroff explores the global preoccupation with criminality in the early twenty-first century, a preoccupation strikingly disproportionate, in most places and for most people, to the risks posed by lawlessness to the conduct of everyday life. Ours in an epoch in which law-making, law-breaking, and law-enforcement are ever more critical registers in which societies construct, contest, and confront truths about themselves, an epoch in which criminology, broadly defined, has displaced sociology as the privileged means by which the social world knows itself. They also argue that as the result of a tectonic shift in the triangulation of capital, the state, and governance, the meanings attached to crime and, with it, the nature of policing, have undergone significant change; also, that there has been a palpable muddying of the lines between legality and illegality, between corruption and conventional business; even between crime-and-policing, which exist, nowadays, in ever greater, hyphenated complicity. Thinking through Crime and Policing is, therefore, an excursion into the contemporary Order of Things; or, rather, into the metaphysic of disorder that saturates the late modern world, indeed, has become its leitmotif. It is also a meditation on sovereignty and citizenship, on civility, class, and race, on the law and its transgression, on the political economy of representation.