Two memoirs, both centred on and inspired by the authors’ mothers, are narratives from the world’s two most populous nations, India and China.
Indian essayist and novelist Arundhati Roy’s memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me, is a portrayal of the fierce, contradictory woman who shaped her. Her Hydra-headed mother — brutal to her children, brilliant as a trailblazing teacher-activist — applies to India, too. Roy touches on or condenses many of the polemical essays she has written about Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s populist rule. India’s image as a rising economic and technological power masks deep inequality, communal strife and environmental devastation.
Jung Chang’s Fly, Wild Swans is a follow-up and update of Wild Swans, her 1991 memoir of three generations of women — her grandmother, mother and herself — in the tumult of 20th-century China.
Wild Swans was banned in China. Deeper context is that Chang also wrote a controversial, revisionist biography, Mao: The Unknown Story, portraying China’s leader as one of history’s monsters, responsible for 70-million deaths attributable to his Great Leap Forward, the resultant 1959-1961 famine, and his 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution. Blended within the bigger picture of China’s politics and society, Fly, Wild Swans is a sad personal and family story, giving insights into how people suffered through revolutions and transformations.
It also raises questions about the agenda of Xi Jinping, China’s poker-faced paramount leader since 2012. Chang writes that five years ago she was convinced Xi intended to forge a neo-Maoist state and aim for global hegemony. Now she believes “democracy will not be beaten by Maoism, in whatever form”.
Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy (Penguin). Fly, Wild Swans: My Mother, Myself and China by Jung Chang (HarperCollins)
A precedent for slavery reparations emerged near the end of the American Civil War with Field Order 15, which promised freed men “40 acres and a mule”. The pledge was rescinded after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, and the cause has since advanced only minimally. However, it is gaining momentum — accompanied by much controversy.
Two new works deepen our understanding of slavery’s history and its legacy. Martin Plaut’s Unbroken Chains: A 5,000-Year History of African Enslavement strips bias from the established narrative. Slavery, as old as civilisation, was practised globally, including in Africa. The transatlantic trade, with its 40- to 60-day Middle Passage horror, dominates modern perceptions and is foundational to how we think of slavery, yet the transatlantic trade was relatively short-lived and not the largest in scale.
The Indian Ocean and trans-Sahara routes — together termed the Islamic trade — stole more Africans and endured a millennium longer. Plaut’s concluding exhortation isn’t specifically for reparations; he wants governments and social movements to commit to eradicating forms of slavery that persist today.
More directly tied to reparations is The Black Atlantic’s Triple Burden: Slavery, Colonialism and Reparations. The volume’s first sections give concise histories of slavery in the Americas and Caribbean, showing how it morphed into colonialism before, in the last segment, tracing and tracking reparations movements in the US, Britain, the Caribbean, Latin America and Africa.
“Black Atlantic” is a term attempting to reconnect a shared identity and history, and efforts are starting to synchronise; interestingly, Africa has been the last polity to cohere its stance and to participate meaningfully in the diaspora’s activism. In today’s political climate, reparations may seem quixotic, but the book builds an argument that slavery’s history and consequences cannot be forgotten.
Unbroken Chains: A 5,000-Year History of African Enslavement by Martin Plaut (Hurst). The Black Atlantic’s Triple Burden: Slavery, Colonialism and Reparations by Adekeye Adebajo (ed.) (Jacana)
Two new novels will appeal to lovers of literary fiction. Maria Reva’s Endling, a Booker prize nominee, has a surreal central plot: a malacologist, trying to save snail species on the brink of extinction, is caught in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Her solitary life takes on a parallel purpose when she becomes party to the kidnapping of a group of Western men in Ukraine to find brides. Their survival, as well as that of her beloved molluscs — and Ukraine itself — transforms into an epic journey across the country, navigating the horrors and bizarre episodes of war. Thrilling, appalling, weird and funny, the novel satirises the world’s selective sympathy as a nation fights for its existence.
Ian McEwan’s latest, What We Can Know, is as masterful, and more dystopian, than his 2019 alternative history, Machines Like Me. Set a century in the future, the world has been upended by nuclear war, climate catastrophes and pandemics. Amid this Age of Derangement a literature scholar searches for a long-lost poem. “Amid the disasters, world literature produced its most beautiful laments, gorgeous nostalgia, eloquent fury,” he thinks of the early 21st century. But his quest leads to shocking, alternative revelations, and the second part of the book becomes a genuine thriller.
Endling by Maria Reva. What We Can Know by Ian McEwan (both Penguin Random House)
Short stories offer different reading enjoyment, and hit the spot for passing travel time. Award-winning Israeli short-story writer Etgar Keret’s works have been translated into 48 languages. The Financial Times calls him “a grandmaster of the incongruous”, and his works have drawn admiration from, among others, Salman Rushdie.
All 33 stories in his latest collection, Autocorrect, are 10 pages or shorter yet are ingeniously premised and capitalise on deep insights of the human psyche. Mainly, they are rooted in the isolation or loneliness of our digital age — navigating online dating, coping with remote work, getting to grips with virtual reality — and have a pervasive sadness even when suffused with humour and ending relatively happily.
Often they are surreal and unresolved, mirroring, perhaps, the inconclusive direction of AI, which is a specific theme of some of the tales, like Soulo, about husband-and-wife neuroscientists who divorce but cannot live without one another’s respective faults, and create AI humanoid partners with precisely the personalities of their erstwhile spouses.
The title story captures the sense of regret for not saying things that matter, putting on hold personal feelings to prioritise work, or being curt when kindness would be no trouble. Wishing we could rewind words, or have done something differently, that we could have another chance at a crossroads moment: Keret’s straightforward story of a tech entrepreneur’s morning is universally relatable and a jarring warning that, if we take life for granted, fate will course-correct in its own, often unwanted and sometimes awful way.
Autocorrect by Etgar Keret (Granta)
Science can be stranger than fiction, a truism revealed in South African theoretical physicist Adriana Marais’s book Out of This World and Into the Next. Ambitiously, she attempts to explain the near unfathomable: the vastness of the universe and its composition, the 4.5-billion-year formation of Earth, the tumultuous evolution of humans — including, about 900,000 years ago, our early ancestors’ near extinction when total global numbers dropped to 10,000-20,000.
Indeed, the history of life on Earth has seen at least six global extinction events and, Marais informs, “99% of all organisms that have ever lived are now extinct”. Her astonishing but logical conclusion is that if humankind is to endure we will need to migrate to elsewhere in space, because Earth’s habitable lifespan is four-fifths over.
Where to next? Marais has the courage of her convictions, having volunteered and been shortlisted for the one-way Mars One project in 2014. The mission went bankrupt, but, she believes, “it won’t be much longer before we’re building new worlds beyond home”.
Out of This World and Into the Next by Adriana Marais (Profile Books)
Readers who prefer to grapple with science through the lens of fiction should turn to Alex Foster’s mesmerising debut, Circular Motion. Imagine Earth’s rotation accelerating, imperceptibly at first, then dramatically, until the sun rises and sets almost hourly. If planetary crisis became this visible, would global society finally curb harmful practices? Would corporations abandon their fixation on profit and dominance?
No, is the novel’s answer to both questions. The plot follows two main characters confronting the descent into doomsday. Denialism prevails; Earth’s faster axis spin is attributable to a constant westward circuit by giant air-travel vessels with pods that drop passengers off anywhere along a comprehensive, global network of bus-stop-like stations. This cheap, instantaneous travel is run by an opaque corporation whose communications chief notes, cynically but accurately, that “every customer demands two things. He demands the products and services we provide. And he demands a clean conscience with which to consume them.”
The world spinning out of control is an obvious metaphor for 21st-century anxiety, but Circular Motion manages to thrill and surprise. Foster’s style evokes that of leading literary science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson, and flashes of wit or wordplay pierce the extrapolating existential stress: “He tried to kill time answering emails, but time proved hardier than he hoped,” says the narrator of one protagonist’s angst.
Circular Motion by Alex Foster (Grove Press)
Next month’s Australian Open will renew the spellbinding competition between the sport’s new generation of tennis superstars, Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner.
It isn’t logical that a 22-year-old is already the subject of a second biography. But Alcaraz’s stellar career statistics mark him as the game’s GOAT-in-waiting. Only Björn Borg had won six grand slams by the same minnow career stage; if he continues to win at this rate, Alcaraz will streak ahead of Pete Sampras, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, and match Novak Djokovic’s record of 24 grand slams by the time he is 31.
Learning about him now, near the beginning of his apparently inevitable trajectory, will add a dimension to the pleasure of watching Alcaraz’s sporting journey.
The data interests me less than his varied style of play, the forehand power and rabbiting retrievals complementing the craftiest disguise on drop shots. He smiles and seems to enjoy matches more than his main rivals. “That’s not the norm,” writes fellow Spaniard and Wimbledon and French Open women’s champion Garbiñe Muguruza in the book’s foreword.
Long may that last.
Being Carlos Alcaraz by Mark Hodgkinson (Cassell)
The corporate biography of South Africa-headquartered TymeBank, recently named among Time magazine’s 2025 list of the world’s 100 most influential companies, is surprisingly readable and enjoyable for a business book.
Creditably, too, it is not hagiographic. “We are forgetting our own stories,” co-founder Coenraad Jonker told the co-authors, Gibs economics professor Adrian Saville and journalist Bruce Whitfield, urging them to tell the company’s origin and continuing story “warts and all”.
A compelling account unfolds, relevant beyond fintech, of founder-mentality innovation, resilience, and the need for leaders to embrace constant learning. The power of strategic flexibility and corporate culture comes through clearly. Citing modern management theorist Peter Drucker’s line that culture eats strategy for breakfast, the authors ask whether the best organisations let “culture feed breakfast to strategy”.
In Tyme’s Manila office, a poster reads, “We want to build the biggest retail bank in the country by 2028.” An employee has amended it in permanent marker: “We will build the most loved retail bank in the country by 2028.”
Still, Saville and Whitfield warn of hurdles to Tyme’s business continuity, let alone further success. A recently concluded joint venture with Sanlam may buffet risks associated with growth and global volatility.
It’s About Tyme: Banking Beyond Borders by Adrian Saville and Bruce Whitfield (Macmillan)
A gift idea for a foodie — or to widen your own culinary horizon — is Larousse French Cooking. Sophisticated and weighty but compact enough to let lie on the kitchen counter, its recipes are comparatively straightforward and open a window to lesser-known regions and dishes of France. The cookbook has heritage and gravitas, because the original 1938 Larousse Gastronomique is a chef’s reference book — worth mentioning around the Christmas Day braai.
A smaller stocking stuffer is Taking the Anxiety Out of AI by Sameer Rawjee. Its epigraph encapsulates positivity in the face of change: AI takes jobs; customers want new experiences; humans prevail again. Interesting and practical, the book helps soothe sensibilities about where AI may be taking us.
Larousse French Cooking (Hamlyn). Taking the Anxiety Out of AI by Sameer Rawjee (Penguin Random House South Africa)
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