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Includes abstract. / Set in the challenging environment of a road construction project in Benin, West Africa, this is a story about three women and their intertwined lives. Each woman has a different personal reason for being in Benin. Each woman needs the courage to make a decision that will have far-reaching consequences.

Includes bibliographical references. / Crystal Night is a teenage love story that takes place in South Africa in the 1980s between Rachel, a Jewess, and Danny, a Catholic. Initially the Jewish fear of intermarriage and anti-Semitism that Rachel inherits from her parents challenges this relationship, and when Danny is conscripted into the army by the Apartheid state, his mysterious death ends it.

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 523-524). / This novel, Heartfruit, challenges the traditional fann novel as practised specifically by Afrikaans writers in South Africa and challenged by a younger generation of writers, post 1980. It therefore challenges the genre of fann novel. The rewrite of the fann novel presupposes a critical view on social and economic relationships within a rural context and the usurping of traditional power relationships within the fanning context. This novel traces the story of a South African fruit fann and the fann' s transition from a traditional white-held ownership to a new dispensation of collective ownership where traditional roles of worker and landowner are redefined. The story explores the economic relationships and legal issues surrounding fanning and the export of fruit from South Africa. Time-wise the novel stretches from the 1970's to approx the tum of the 20th century. As a historical novel it also deals with a private relationship and the public implications of this relationship within a changing political and economical space. The novel begins with the main male protagonist, a fruit fanner traveling in Europe in search of funding and new markets, here at the end of the 1990' s. The latter half of this decade has seen the opening up of trade for individual growers and agents in South Africa to access international markets, without governmental control through the old Marketing Board system. He has an accident in the home of his estranged brother in Holland, whereby he lands up in hospital. Here he has time to reflect and consider his private history as well as his future and the fragile prospects of the new fann structurc he has implemented. In essence the novel speaks of a broader human experience of loss and guilt as well as the struggle to reach out and build relationships. The title of the novel, Heartfruit is derived from the common name of the tree Hymenocardia acida, which is a tree indigenous to Southern Africa. The fruit of the tree is in the shape of a deeply indented heart, turning red and conspicuous when mature. In African culture, the fresh leaves are placed in the roof of a house to protect it from lightning. The root ashes and the bark are also used for various oral and stomach conditions.

Includes abstract. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 264-265). / Fractured Lives is a non-fiction work. Part autobiography, part history, part social comment and part war story, it covers a 15 year period, from the early 1980’s to the mid 1990’s when I was making documentaries about the wars taking place in the Southern African region. The films were not about Africa or war, so much as about the effect of war on people’s lives, especially those of women and children. Fractured Lives draws on the experience of making the films, using the stories of people who appear in them. It is my view of what we experienced during those journeys and I drive the narrative, although it is more about the people and places I was filming than about me. I have called it Fractured Lives because the lives of many people I filmed were destroyed almost beyond understanding.

Includes bibliographical references. / This collection of 47 poems, Questions for the Sea, explores questions pertaining to the frailty of human existence within the natural and built environment. Many of the poems involve some form of human exposure, and subsequent response, to the e.ects of the natural elements. The presence of the ocean, whether obvious or nuanced, is o.ered to the reader as a constant; and serves as a point of entry or departure, and even inquiry, for the poems. The collection is divided into nine sections which encompass themes including landscape, natural topographies, specific localities within South Africa, inter-personal relationships, and aspects of human conflict, both historical and contemporary. Of special interest to the poet, are the visual properties of the poem’s form on paper, as well as its association with poetic style and narrative function.

Through unfolding, fragmentary memoirs, the disconnected odyssey of Nick Numbers, a rock music critic working in London and LA through the 1970s into the early 1980s, Rock & Roll explores the multiple realities that exist between documentary, documentable fact and supposedly pure fiction. Real people and verifiable occurrences are interwoven with invented characters and situations in a way that blurs any clear distinction between the two. The book also sees how the power of additions such as images and footnotes can add, or perhaps undermine, authority and credibility to a story. Meanwhile, stories connect the twin musical and lyrical strands, black rhythm and blues and the writings of the Beat generation, that somehow merged in the mid-1960s to produce rock music. They play with the self-imposed otherness of the self-defined rebel, and how this normalises behaviour that would be unacceptable outside the bubble of exemption. They connect, in passing, Nick Numbers' odyssey with earlier models, Homer, Joyce, C.P. Cavafy and Richard Fariña, heroic, anti-heroic and mock-heroic. And they grapple with the very nature of storytelling itself, the relationship between the storyteller and the story, between the storyteller and the audience, something that goes right back to an essential distinction between Homer, the bard, and Odysseus, the teller of tales who gets to relate his own remarkable, perhaps even incredible, adventures. In a world of truthiness, of alternative facts, a post-factual world, how can fiction respond to increasingly abstract or, perhaps, simply cynical notions of truth and veracity? If the real world can cut its facts from whole cloth to suit the needs of the occasion, where does that leave the storyteller? If the role of any artist or creator, as Hamlet says of playing, is to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature, one response is to reflect and highlight the untrustworthiness of everything. Rock & Roll does not merely have an unreliable narrator, it explores an unreliable world. The book is followed by "Why I Write What I Write," a self-reflective, or reflexive essay that explores the route I took to start writing it.

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