by Chrissy Freer

My COVID fallout – quite literally – has been my hair.   Three months after having COVID my hair started falling out so dramatically that it was much more traumatic than having the disease in the first place!  Hence my interest in improving my diet…

Chronic inflammation is on the increase in our modern world, leading to common symptoms such as fatigue and joint pain, even in young people. It destroys the body’s ability to self-regulate, leaving the immune system continually hyper-alert, potentially causing damage to healthy cells and organs. Risk factors include excess weight, chronic stress, alcohol, smoking, or a diet high in processed foods, saturated fats and refined sugars. The good news is that including anti-inflammatory foods in your diet can help relieve symptoms, reduce the risk of chronic inflammation and promote well-being. 

The recipes in this book by Aussie nutritionist, Chrissy Freer, have been created especially for their anti-inflammatory effect and, in addition, are all gluten free. Many are also vegetarian or vegan, dairy- and nut-free, making it easy to cater for the differing needs of family and friends. 

The roasted sweet potato and cashew hummus is totally delicious! Parmesan and herb chicken schnitzels, fragrant fish and bean curry and quinoa risotto are lined up for our next dinners.

by David Baldacci

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by Damon Galgut

The Promise is a sensitive, clever and challenging literary read.  It’s beautifully crafted, as we’ve come to expect from Damon Galgut.   It touches South African nerves, at the same time proving a real treat for lovers of considered words and fine structure.

The book is divided into four parts – four family funerals, each one happening four decades apart beginning in the mid 1980’s during the state of emergency and finishing up in 2018. In the background, a different president is in power, and a different spirit hangs over the country, while in the foreground the Swart family fights over what they call their farm, on a worthless piece of land outside Pretoria.  Jon Day of the Guardian sums up The Promise as follows: “The head of the family is Herman “Manie” Swart, an unreconstructed racist who runs a reptile park called Scaly City and has recently found religion. His wife, Rachel, has converted (or reverted) to Judaism on her deathbed, and her death marks the beginning of the book. She leaves behind three children: Anton, Astrid and Amor.
The “promise” of the title is a literal one, made by Rachel before she dies: to give a house on the farm to their black servant, Salome. It’s also a metaphorical one. Over the years, as members of the family find reasons to deny or defer Salome’s inheritance, the moral promise – the potential, or expectation – of the next generation of South Africans, and of the nation itself, is shown to be just as compromised as that of their parents.”

A book to relish by one of South Africa’s finest authors.  Read it slowly and take it all in.

Damon Galgut’s The Promise is about an unfulfilled but promising life and about the repeatedly broken promises by a white family to a black household worker. With unostentatious virtuosity Galgut – one of the world’s great writers – enters the minds of all his characters, rich or poor, white or black, male or female, even the thoughts of a homeless man beset by visions. The language has a Flaubertian clarity and the intimate knowledge of the family is matched by an authoritative understanding of South Africa’s complex history. – Edmund White

The Promise is a gorgeous and pleasurable novel, with an imaginative heft to match Galgut’s fellow South African writers Gordimer, Coetzee and Brink. It’s richly evocative of the land and its people, and reports on a new South Africa without fake moralising; it made me laugh, too. – Tessa Hadley, author of The Past

Galgut’s central interest has always been human nature and in The Promise he explores how land affects nation building, citizenship and identity formation – Business Day

To praise the novel in its particulars – for its seriousness; for its balance of formal freedom and elegance; for its humour, its precision, its human truth – seems inadequate and partial. Simply: you must read it. – Harper’s Magazine

Watch Marc Gevisser in conversation with Damon Galgut here – hosted by The Reading List

by Anne Griffin

Did you read Anne Griffin’s first book – When All is Said?  It sold over 120 000 copies and was translated into 16 languages.  I listened to the audiobook, read in a delicious Irish accent – it was wonderful!  And Maurice makes a brief appearance in this second book, Listening Still, a gentle, utterly absorbing read about a young woman who has a special gift – she can hear the recently dead and pass on their last wishes and revelations to grieving relatives.  She and her father share this gift which brings clients from all over Ireland to their small-town undertakering business.

But Jeanie is struggling with could’ves, should’ves, would’ves …. Caught between duty to the family business and following her heart.   Full of regret, ten years later she is still haunted by her decision not to move to London with her first great love, choosing rather to stay at Masterson Funeral Directors and marry her faithful childhood friend, Niall.

Jeanie is forced to answer some tough, unavoidable questions when her parents – out of the blue – announce their retirement to the coast, leaving her the business.  What is it that she actually wants from life?  Is she happily married?  Why doesn’t she want to start a family?  Why does she have such a love/hate relationship with her work?  Should she be censoring what she hears to protect the living?  And why does she feel her family are withholding something from her?

I was engrossed. A lovely read about life choices and regrets and how to move forward.

A wonderfully unexpected tale of love, death and everything in between – Graham Norton

Absorbing and heartwarming . . . There are deep thoughts sown beneath the light and charming surfaces of Griffin’s novels. Her books are fable-like, deep musings on life, mortality, and what makes a life worth living, philosophy for everyday readers, cleverly disguised as a good old-fashioned story – Irish Times

by Jackie Polzin

Brood:

1. Noun: a family of birds produced at one hatching. “a brood of chicks”
2. Verb: think deeply about something that makes one unhappy, angry or worried
3. Verb: hover over, as of something threatening, dark or menacing
4. Verb: sit on eggs to incubate/hatch them
5. Adjective broody: wishing/having a strong desire for a baby

Meet Gloria, Gam Gam, Darkness, Miss Hennepin County, and their owner. Over the course of a year, our nameless narrator heroically tries to keep her small brood of four chickens alive despite the seemingly endless challenges that caring for another creature entails. From the freezing nights of a brutal winter to a sweltering summer which brings a surprise tornado, she battles predators, bad luck, and the uncertainty of a future that may not look anything like the one she always imagined. 

Having lovingly kept chickens in our back garden in Joburg – Nuggets, KFC, Nibbles and Chicken Licken –  I was instantly drawn to Brood and its delightful examination of the lives of these odd little creatures!  But I was equally taken by the narrator’s everyday observations and her gradual acceptance of the fact that she will probably never have children of her own. Quirky, inquisitive, funny, sad, unexpected, observant, an examination of small, ordinary things as well as big, buried emotions.  A lovely little book on everyday life, marriage, longing and hope.

Watch the author, Jackie Polzin, here chatting about the book.

Completely original, full of surprise, humour, grief, and wisdom and just the right amount of chickens – Karen Joy Fowler, author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

The narrative is full of such sharp, distinctive observations as the narrator works to move on from her desire to have children. Told in short vignettes studded with breath-catching wisdom, this novel feels both delicate and sustaining from beginning to end – Publishers Weekly

by Peace Adzo Medie

With spot on characterizations of deeply involved extended families and realistic depictions of how money can change everything, Peace Adzo Medi conjures a Cinderella story just right for 2021. – Time

“Ma, I don’t know him; what if I don’t like him?”  … She sighed with her whole torso and then locked eyes with me.  “Afi, don’t forget who you are.  You are not an actress and this is not a romance film.  This is real life.  This is our life.  You will get to know him and like him.  That is how it is.”

His Only Wife starts out as a fairy tale – a Ghanaian Cinderella story.   Afi Tekple, a beautiful young seamstress is plucked from obscurity into a life of unbelievable wealth and privilege.  Elikem Ganyo’s family don’t approve of his Liberian girlfriend and have chosen Afi to lure him away from “That woman”. This is her chance to offer her family financial security and to fulfil her dream of moving to the big city of Accra and owning her own boutique.  But what no-one saw coming – including Afi herself – was that she might find the strength to stand up to the family or that she might actually fall in love with her husband and want to be his only wife…

On the one hand it’s a funny story about infuriatingly meddling extended family members, marriage and Ghanaian customs and on the other it’s a heartfelt look at an independent young woman who grows up to know her own mind and choose her own destiny against what is expected of her.

Medie gives Afi a voice that winningly combines insecurity, wisdom and dignity… The dramas of Afi’s marriage and various family conflicts offer an entertaining plot, rich with humour but it is the story of the strong woman in a challenging and changing world that will capture readers’ hearts.  – Shelf Awareness

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

If summer could somehow fit into a book, then you’d find it in Malibu Rising. – Oprah Daily

I have raved and raved about Daisy Jones and the Six set in the 70’s music scene!  I absolutely adored it so by now you’ll know I am definitely a Taylor Jenkins Reid fan!  Malibu Rising, while in a different league from Daisy Jones, is fabulous and hugely enjoyable escapism.   

Everyone knows the four children of Mick Riva, a pop singer of international fame and irresistible good looks.  Nina, Jay, Hudson and Kit. Not so many people know that Nina, the eldest, held the family together when their father abandoned them and their mother died of a toxic blend of alcohol and heart-break. Surfing is their common bond. Set in Malibu over the course of one day – Saturday, the 27^th of August 1983 – the book tells the story of the four famous siblings, one epic party and the house that will go up in flames before the day is over.  Throughout the hours of the day there are flashbacks to family romances, marriages, births and deaths explaining how and why the Riva’s have reached this particular moment in time.

As Elinor Ripman in the New York Times writes: “Because the novel begins with a short, nicely portentous chapter reminding us that “it is Malibu’s nature to burn,” we are prepared. We wait for the party to ignite, wondering who among the drunken, stoned or marauding guests or family members will bring about the inevitable.   By the end of Malibu Rising, the Riva siblings will learn several truths. They’ll get an answer to the lifelong question: Will their absent, celebrated father ever come back? Even when a fire claims an estate and rolls down the coast; even after the trauma, the betrayals, the distress, the fisticuffs — or perhaps because of them — we leave the party knowing that we don’t have to worry about the Rivas.”

A great read: sex and drugs and rock ‘n roll and surfing and celebrities and Malibu and most importantly family.  Enjoy!

Reid’s descriptions of Malibu are so evocative that readers will swear they feel the sea breeze on their faces or the grit of the sand between their toes. The Rivas have a believable sibling dynamic, and the family members are complex and delightfully flawed (especially Mick, whose bad decisions reverberate throughout the novel). A compulsively readable story about the bonds between family members and the power of breaking free. –  Kirkus Reviews

Malibu Rising is packed with plenty of scintillating scandal, but Reid cultivates real empathy for her characters, who form the tender heart that beats at the novel’s core and are its greatest achievement…. a juicy, irresistible book that will sweep readers away. – Bookpage

a fiery mix of celebrity culture and family drama – Washington Post

by Maggie Shipstead

Marian Graves is a character so real that I twice googled her to check. – Financial Times 

Ingeniously structured and so damn entertaining; this novel is as ambitious as its heroines—but it never falls from the sky. – Kirkus Reviews 

Transcendent . . . A rolling, roiling epic . . . Through the interwoven stories of impetuous flyer Marian Graves and flavor-of-the-month actress Hadley Baxter, Shipstead ponders the motivating forces behind acts of daring defiance, self-fulfillment and self-destruction. An ambitious, soaring saga—[Shipstead] takes her characters to dizzying heights, drawing readers into lives of courage and mystery. – Booklist