These are the books that our books editor, Meneesha Govender, received recently. They may be reviewed later
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Icarus
by Deon Meyer (Hodder & Stoughton)
Captain Benny Griessel is back and he’s been sober for 602 days. But he is a man teetering on the edge – he can’t take any more tragedy.
Then his former friend and colleague shoots his wife and two daughters, and kills himself.
When Benny is asked to investigate the murder suicide, he reaches breaking point.
Benny wants out of his job, his home and his relationship with his girlfriend.
He moves into a hotel – and gives in to the bottle that is always beckoning.
Ernst Richter is the MD of a new tech company – Alibi.
Alibi is a service that creates false phone calls, appointments, documents – anything that can help people to cheat on their partners.
Alibi has made Richter one of the most notorious South Africans around – so anyone could have murdered him and buried his body in the sand dunes of Cape Town.
But Benny’s expertise is needed urgently to solve the case. he question is: he can pull himself together to get the job done.
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Piggy Boy’s Blues
by Nakhane Touré (Blackbird Books)
I first heard of Nakhane Touré when a colleague lent me his CD, Brave Confusion.
Set mostly in the eastern Cape, Piggy Boy’s Blues is a portrait of the M. family and centres mainly around Davide.
Davide returns to Alice, the town of his birth. He is seeking peace and quiet, hoping to find it in his roots.
But his return is not what he or the people living in his old house had bargained for.
His uncle, Ndimphiwe, and the man he lives with, live a quiet existence. Davide’s return disturbs this and results in a string of tragedies.
If Touré’s writing is anything like his music, then this book will be splendid.
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The Book of Memory
by Petina Gappah (Jonathan Ball)
Memory is an albino woman convicted of murder and incarcerated in Chikurubi Maximum Security Prison in Harare. As part of her appeal, her lawyer asks her to write down what happened.
In Zimbabwe, the death penalty is the mandatory sentence for murder.
As she tells her story, we learn that she has been convicted for the murder of Lloyd Hendricks, her adopted father. This is a tale of love, obsession and the treachery of memory.