In the waning days of the South African apartheid, Milla, an elderly white woman, is silenced by a creeping paralysis. As she struggles to communicate with her maidservant turned caretaker, Agaat, the complicated history of their relationship is revealed. Life for white farmers in 1950s South Africa was full of promise. Young and newly married, Milla carved her own farm out of a swathe of Cape mountainside. She earned the respect of the male farmers in her community and raised a son. But forty years later all she has left are memories and the proud, contrary Agaat. With punishing precision, yet infinite tenderness, Agaat performs her duties, balancing anger with loyalty. As Milla’s white world and its certainties recede and Agaat faces the prospect of freedom, the shift of power between them mirrors the historic changes happening around them. Marlene van Niekerk’s epic masterpiece portrays how two women—and, perhaps, a nation—can forge a path toward understanding and reconciliation.

Set in apartheid South Africa, this powerful and lyrically written novel is Linzi Glass's debut.As twelve-year-old Emily Iris explains it, her mother and father have always been eager to take in travelers and vagabonds, relying on the presence of outsiders to ease the tension between them. Emily has her gentle older sister, Sarah, and Buza, the old Zulu nightwatchman, for company and comfort. But her parents' continuing discontent leads them to welcome some peculiar strangers. One spring, a family of wanderers--a wildlife photographer, his wife, and two boys--comes to stay, and their strange, compelling, and dangerous presence will leave the Iris family infinitely changed.

"Riveting…while evocative of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Picnic at Hanging Rock , Kohler's writing is so smoothly confident and erotic that she has produced a tale resonant with a chilling power all its own."— Elle In Sheila Kohler's brilliant 1999 novel, a beautiful schoolgirl mysteriously disappears into the South African veld. Forty years later, thirteen members of the missing girl's swimming team gather at their old boarding school for a reunion, and look back to the long, dry weeks leading to Fiamma's disappearance. As teenage memories and emotions resurface, the women relive the horror of a long-buried secret. A stunning and singular tale of the passion and tribalism of adolescence, Cracks lays bare the violence that lurks in the heart of even the most innocent.

In Boyhood, J. M. Coetzee revisits the South Africa of half a century ago, to write about his childhood and interior life. Boyhood's young narrator grew up in a small country town. With a father he imitated but could not respect, and a mother he both adored and resented, he picked his way through a world that refused to explain its rules, but whose rules he knew he must obey. Steering between these contradictions, Boyhood evokes the tensions, delights and terrors of childhood with startling, haunting immediacy. Coetzee examines his young self with the dispassionate curiosity of an explorer rediscovering his own early footprints, and the account of his progress is bright, hard and simply compelling. "As funny, cruel and terrifying as life itself. It is also intense and elegant, clearly the product of the complex, subtle imagination which shapes Coetzee's outstanding fiction-As austerely beautiful as would be expected of Coetzee the artist-its aloof, edgy grace and seething passion ensure the narrative is both truthful and mysterious". Irish Times