Best Books Set in South Africa

Top 10 Best Books Set in South Africa : The Heart of Redness, Kaffir Boy: An Autobiography, The Story of an African Farm, Cry, the Beloved Country, Dance With A Poor Man's Daughter, Zoo City, Confessions of a Gambler, Fiela se Kind, Welcome to Our Hillbrow, Ancestral Voices

AuthorZakes Mda
ISBN0312421745
This is the story of Camagu who returns to South Africa from America. He becomes disillusioned with the new democracy and moves to the Eastern Cape where the Xhosa people live; he follows a woman he heard sing at a funeral. He does not find her but finds a people split between Believers and Unbelievers;...
Kaffir Boy: An Autobiography
AuthorMark Mathabane
ISBN0684848287
The Classic Story of Life in Apartheid South Africa Mark Mathabane was weaned on devastating poverty and schooled in the cruel streets of South Africa's most desperate ghetto, where bloody gang wars and midnight police raids were his rites of passage. Like every other child born in the hopelessness...
The Story of an African Farm
AuthorOlive Schreiner
ISBN0140431845
The Story of an African Farm By Olive Schreiner A classic story of rural life in 19th Century South Africa, it is a searing indictment of the rigid Boer social conventions. The first of the great South African novels chronicles the adventures of three childhood friends who defy societal repression....
Cry, the Beloved Country
AuthorAlan Paton
Cry, the Beloved Country, the most famous and important novel in South Africa’s history, was an immediate worldwide bestseller in 1948. Alan Paton’s impassioned novel about a black man’s country under white man’s law is a work of searing beauty.

Cry, the beloved country, for the...
AuthorPamela Jooste
ISBN0552997579
'My name is Lily Daniels and I live in The Valley, in an old house at the top of a hill with a loquat tree in the garden. We are all women in our house. My grandmother, my Aunt Stella with her hopalong leg, and me. The men in our family are not worth much. They are the cross we have to bear. Some of us, like my mother,...
Zoo City
AuthorLauren Beukes
ISBN0007327684
Zinzi has a Sloth on her back, a dirty 419 scam habit and a talent for finding lost things. But when a little old lady turns up dead and the cops confiscate her last paycheck, she’s forced to take on her least favourite kind of job – missing persons.

Being hired by reclusive music producer Odi...
Confessions of a Gambler
AuthorRayda Jacobs
ISBN0795701608
In this timely novel, Abeeda, a South African woman in her late forties, is struggling to hold on to both halves of a double life. To others, she is a pious Muslim mother of four, coping with the death of one of her sons to AIDS. But Abeeda has also developed a gambling addiction, winning and losing huge amounts...
Fiela se Kind
AuthorDalene Matthee
ISBN0624022692
This is one of those hidden gems that makes random used-book-sale buying worthwhile. Fiela’s Child is so good that I’m surprised it isn’t more widely read (the creepy 80s cover might have something to do with it).

The book revolves around two families in nineteenth-century South Africa....
Welcome to Our Hillbrow
AuthorPhaswane Mpe
ISBN0869809954
This is a very short novel, a novella really, only 124 pages. It is written as a narrative from a second person, to the main protagonist, who is already dead as the book is written.

Hillbrow is a very violent suburb of Johannesburg in South Africa, and the title of the book is very ironic, as there...
AuthorEtienne van Heerden
ISBN0670828319
There’s nothing worse than a reading slump and when you commit yourself to a project like this they inevitably happen. It is impossible to like something that you don’t feel like reading and from Matigari onwards (with the exception of Watchmen) this was happening. Unfortunately I’ve experienced...
The White Lioness
AuthorHenning Mankell
ISBN0099464691
The execution-style murder of a Swedish housewife looks like a simple case even though there is no obvious suspect. But then Wallander learns of a determined stalker, and soon enough, the cops catch up with him. But when his alibi turns out to be airtight, they realize that what seemed a simple crime of...
The Housemaid's Daughter
AuthorBarbara Mutch
ISBN1250016304
Barbara Mutch's stunning first novel tells a story of love and duty colliding on the arid plains of Apartheid-era South Africa

When Cathleen Harrington leaves her home in Ireland in 1919 to travel to South Africa, she knows that she does not love the man she is to marry there —her fiance Edward,...
AuthorAmanda Eyre Ward
ISBN0345494466
From the acclaimed author of How to Be Lost comes a gorgeous new novel about love, memory, and motherhood.

Nadine Morgan travels the world as a journalist, covering important events, following dangerous leads, and running from anything that might tie her down. Since an assignment in Cape...
Spud
AuthorJohn van de Ruit
ISBN1595141707
It’s 1990. Apartheid is crumbling. Nelson Mandela has just been released from prison. And Spud Milton—thirteen-year-old, prepubescent choirboy extraordinaire—is about to start his first year at an elite boys-only boarding school in South Africa. Cursed with embarrassingly dysfunctional...
Recipes for Love and Murder
AuthorSally Andrew
ISBN1782116451
Meet Tannie Maria: A woman who likes to cook a lot and write a little. Tannie Maria writes recipes for a column in her local paper, the Klein Karoo Gazette.

One Sunday morning, as Maria savours the breeze through the kitchen window whilst making apricot jam, she hears the screech and bump that...
AuthorPatrick Flanery
ISBN0307401278
In this stunning literary debut, Patrick Flanery delivers a devastating and intimate portrait of post-apartheid South Africa, and the perils of taking sides when the sides are changing around you.
 
Told in shifting perspectives, Absolution is centred on the mysterious character of Clare...
AuthorDan Sleigh
This novel of epic proportions from South Africa, set between 1650 and 1710, covers the first fifty years of the Dutch colony at the Cape of Good Hope. Beautifully rendered, this is a world and a time never before dealt with in fiction-a period when powerful colonizers took over the lands of Hottentot...
AuthorAchmat Dangor
ISBN0802170064
With the publication of Kafka's Curse, Achmat Dangor established himself as an utterly singular voice in South African fiction. His new novel, a finalist for the Man Booker Prize and the IMPAC-Dublin Literary Award, is a clear-eyed, witty, yet deeply serious look at South Africa's political history...
AuthorSindiwe Magona
ISBN1566566495
Exceptionally written. Made up of words which had my emotions all over the place.

Mama Sindiwe emptied herself. She poured all which she wanted her grandchildren and great-grandchildren to know. About her beginnings. Her dreams as a girl, young lady, mother, wife and grandmother.

The...
AuthorTrilby Kent
ISBN1770492526
Corlie Roux’s farm life in South Africa is not easy: the Transvaal is beautiful, but it is also a harsh place where the heat can be so intense that the very raindrops sizzle. When her beloved father dies, she is left with a mother who is as devoted to her sons as she is cruel to her daughter. Despite this,...
Shirley, Goodness & Mercy: A Childhood in Africa
AuthorChris van Wyk
ISBN0330444832
Despite Van Wyk's later becoming involved in the anti-apartheid struggle, this is not a book about racial politics. Instead, it is a delightful account of one boy's special relationship with the relatives, friends and neighbors—often decidedly quirky—who made up his community, and of the important...
The Ridge
AuthorCarmen-Shea Hepburn
This is an alternate cover edition for ISBN13: 9780995621701.

Set in Amanzimtoti, South Africa, the story follows Wayne du Preez as he starts his matric. Completing his final year of high school won’t be his only problem, however, when a boy from his childhood makes a surprise reappearance...
Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa
AuthorAntjie Krog
ISBN0812931297
Ever since Nelson Mandela dramatically walked out of prison in 1990 after twenty-seven years behind bars, South Africa has been undergoing a radical transformation. In one of the most miraculous events of the century, the oppressive system of apartheid was dismantled. Repressive laws mandating...
AuthorJ.M. Coetzee
In a South Africa torn by civil war, Michael K sets out to take his mother back to her rural home. On the way there she dies, leaving him alone in an anarchic world of brutal roving armies. Imprisoned, Michael is unable to bear confinement and escapes, determined to live with dignity. Life and Times of Michael...
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