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AV Education — One Whale of a Good Yarn The subject of today’s episode of Amabookabooka is ‘A Poor Season For Whales’, which is not the title of a sport’s book about the Welsh rugby team’s miserable 1991 year when they were walloped 63-3 by the Wallabies. ‘A Poor Season For Whales’ (with an H) is author, translator and English professor Michiel Heyns’ outstanding new novel. The book has everything: vivid imagery, beautiful descriptions, fascinating characters, gripping dialogue, understated humour, an intriguing plot, a sharp knife hanging over it and a dassie-chasing Doberman named Benjy. (Michiel reveals why every one of his novels features a dog…)

AV Education — Bruce Almighty Some would say that it is dreadful timing to launch a book at the same time that Covid-19 has decided to go hitchhiking around the globe, but for one book - The Upside of Down - the timing is spot on. The world is upside down and the Upside of Down highlights opportunities during chaos. The Upside of Down is written by the king of the business airwaves Bruce Whitfield, who has the incredibly rare gift of making complex financial issues easy to understand. Through absorbing anecdotes, cautionary tales, some multiple choice quizzes or six, Bruce tells us that South Africa has extraordinary problems - but with extraordinary problems come extraordinary opportunities. Spoiler alert: In the episode, Bruce reveals the four words that Nando’s chief Robbie Brozen told him that perfectly sums up the state of the world at the moment.

AV Education — A Lockdown mystery Heinrich Böhmke loves trees, bees, wind over the veld and Nguni cattle - and even though he loves cattle he’s not scared to stomp all over sacred cows. Heinrich’s debut novel Sarie tells the story of four lives in crisis - on the same day. In the same hotel. It mixes South African politics and history, with a thrilling plot and, as one reviewer put it: There is no chill with this book! Heinrich’s latest book, The Helpless Lady, is a world away from Sarie. It’s a children’s book set in the Lockdown. Day 17 starts off just like any other boring Lockdown day but turns into a day of mystery and adventure when 9-year-old Erika sees a desperate message for help in her neighbour's window. Erika’s grumpy dad is busy so she takes matters into her own hands to rescue her elderly neighbour - all while keeping her social distance. It’s a fast, heart-warming story told with humour and there are a few twists at the end to keep you on your toes.

AV Education — Low Down on Health Horror Today’s episode of Amabookabooka is a throwback to 2017 when novelist, journalist and public health activist Marcus Low coughed up the incredible and, as it turns out, very credible dystopian health-horror novel Asylum. A high-security quarantine facility has been set up in the Karoo for people with a highly infectious lung disease known as “pulmonary nodulosis” - there is no cure. The inmates have been separated from the rest of the country - where they do nothing much but wait to die. Asylum is like an uncooked onion: raw with layers upon layers and will make you cry. It is a thought-provoking and superbly written book that will do to you what a fictional South African government did to the novel’s protagonist Barry James – hold you captive.

AV Education — Low Down on Health Horror Today’s episode of Amabookabooka is a throwback to 2017 when novelist, journalist and public health activist Marcus Low coughed up the incredible and, as it turns out, very credible dystopian health-horror novel Asylum. A high-security quarantine facility has been set up in the Karoo for people with a highly infectious lung disease known as “pulmonary nodulosis” - there is no cure. The inmates have been separated from the rest of the country - where they do nothing much but wait to die. Asylum is like an uncooked onion: raw with layers upon layers and will make you cry. It is a thought-provoking and superbly written book that will do to you what a fictional South African government did to the novel’s protagonist Barry James – hold you captive.

AV Education — Celebrating the Joy of Matt Today is a very special edition of Amabookabooka. We pay tribute to and celebrate the life of Matthew Buckland - a tech wonder kid, a digital fundi, an entrepreneur, an innovator, a journalist, a publisher, an author, a mountain biker and a compulsive dreamer who had big dreams. Matt always had a sparkle in his eye and a million-buck grin. In the middle of 2018 Matt was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer. On the day of his first chemo session in October he started to write a book about his entrepreneurial journey. Two months later he sent the manuscript to his publisher. Matt died on 23 April last year shortly before his book So You Want to Build a Startup was published. He was just 44. We chat to Matt’s dad, Andrew Buckland, and good friend Vince Maher about Matt's extraordinary life.

AV Education — Lauren Beuekes imagines a brand new world Lauren Beukes crisscrosses literary genres to write ground-breaking weird-and-wonderful dystopian thrillers. Her novels - Moxyland, Zoo City, The Shining Girls, Broken Monsters - are beautifully written, with complex characters and intriguing pulse-racing plots and plots within plots that are skillfully knitted together. Lauren also writes comics and screen plays, directed the documentary Glitterboys & Ganglands, and wrote the New York Times bestselling graphic novel Fairest: The Hidden Kingdom. Academics study her work, fans name their pets and children after her characters and she has won prestigious literary honours. She has received endorsements from Stephen King, shout outs from George RR Martin and big-ups from Neil Gaiman. Lauren is the Trevor Noah of the literary horror-sci-fi-spec-fic-cyberpunk-fantasy- psych-thriller-dystopian world. And now Afterland, her spanking new novel about a global pandemic has come out slap-bang in the middle of a global pandemic.  

AV Education — Gail Schimmel writes best-selling novels that have more twists and turns than Kyalami: Marriage Vows, Whatever Happened to the Cowley Twins?, The Park; and The Accident. Her most recent novel, the two week-old Two Months is a psychological thriller. Primary school teacher Erica and her husband Kenneth have a great life: Erica loves her job, loves her husband but one morning she wakes up and has forgotten the last two months of her life. She begins to piece together what has happened with terrible consequences. You will probably laugh and maybe even cry as the story unfolds but you will certainly gasp when it ends…

AV Education — Today’s Amabookabooka guest has written two very different books - On Your Bike, which is a guide to mountain biking in South Africa. The second is Paper Tiger: Iqbal Survé and the downfall of Independent Newspapers, which is a riveting account of what happened to the Cape Times when it was taken over by the controversial businessman. Chris Whitfield, who wrote On Your Bike with his brother Tim, is an accomplished mountain biker with four Cape Epic Finisher’s T-shirts hanging in his cupboard. He wrote Paper Tiger with Alide Dasnois, the erstwhile editor of the Cape Times who was fired by Survé the morning after Nelson Mandela died. Chris, who was the most senior editorial person in Independent when it was taken over by Survé, had a front-row seat to the unfolding drama.

AV Education — Confronting the ghosts of war Paul Morris went to Angola in 1987. He was a young soldier who had been conscripted into the South African Defence Force as it waged a brutal bush war against its neighbours. For 25 years Angola was the country of Paul’s nightmares. He returned to the country in 2012 - this time he wasn’t a 20-year-old soldier in an army’s armoured buffel; he was a middle-aged man on a bicycle. He cycled 1500km across the country to witness Angola in peacetime; to enjoy the beauty of the bush and to meet the people who live there. One of the people he met was Roberto, a Cuban, who had been fighting in Angola against the apartheid army - the meeting with Roberto was the most profound moment of Paul’s life. In Back to Angola, Paul's memoir published in 2014, he writes about a journey that took him back into the past as well as into the present.

AV Education — Penny Haw grew up on a dairy farm in KwaZulu-Natal - she spent her childhood with cows and stories about Nicko - the abandoned vervet monkey that was rescued and raised by her grandmother Alice Kirk. The monkey became an essential member of the farmyard, befriending the dogs, cats, African polecats, and a duiker. In 2017 Penny wrote Nicko – The Tale of a Vervet Monkey on an African Farm. The book for tweens is a series of hilarious, heart-warming and sometimes heart-wrenching adventures and misadventures that Nicko and his friends get up to.

AV Education — Today marks the 27th anniversary of the assassination of Chris Hani. For many the revered revolutionary was the president we never had. But 12-year-old Lindiwe Hani hadn’t lost the head of the SA Communist Party - it was her daddy who had been cruelly taken away from her. Tragedy after tragedy followed, sending Lindiwe into a fog of cocaine and booze until she smashed into rock bottom. In 2014, she became sober. In 2017 she penned her remarkable memoir Being Chris Hani’s Daughter, revealing details of her descent into addiction and the hard road to recovery and redemption. People often wonder what South Africa would be like if Chris Hani hadn’t been killed. It’s an impossible question and while we can speculate, we don’t know. What we do know, though, is Chris Hani would have been extremely proud of his courageous daughter.

AV Education — Don’t let Caryn Dolley fool you - the woman with the goofiest grin and the wackiest sense of humour in South African journalism has struck fear into the heart of some the toughest gangsters who roam the underworld. Caryn is the author of the hard-hitting book The Enforcers: Inside Cape Town's Deadly Nightclub Battles. The Enforcers exposes the war playing out in the grubby underbelly of the Mother City to dominate the security trade. The book is so good because Caryn did something that is becoming increasingly rare - she did proper boots-on-the-ground journalism …

AV Education — In Just Seven Days Frank-N-Furter can make you a man. Well, that’s nothing because in just seven days Melinda Ferguson can make you a MAN… uscript. Melinda is a best-selling author, a prized publisher and an unstoppable force. A few days ago she published Lockdown, the Corona Chronicles. Written by 17 authors, in 7 days and published in 10 … it’s surely the fastest book from concept to publication. Each chapter is a story of life in lockdown and they range from whimsical to wry to profound to inspiring to heart-breaking to hysterical. She explains how she pulled off this publishing coup.

AV Education — Moe Shaik’s memoir, The ANC Spy Bible, is an enthralling first-hand account of the relationship between Moe and his unlikely mole in the belly of the apartheid beast - The Nightingale. The book is thoughtful, detailed and nuanced and provides a bird’s eye view of the mysterious world of secrets.

AV Education — Brent Meersman’s compelling memoir, A Childhood Made Up, sees the author hurtle down memory lane to his childhood in Cape Town, where he grew up in a family where storms were constantly ranging. His father, Willy, had a hairlip, an alcohol-addiction and battled with depression. Brent’s mother, the captivating Shirley Meersman aka Shirley Morris, aka Sirrom aka Churley aka Sherli, leaps out of the pages. Shirley is an absentminded artist who is contemptuous of South Africans who think Picasso is a type of cheese. She also suffers from schizophrenia. A Childhood Made Up is a poignant and powerful memoir skilfully told with raw and gritty honesty, but Brent also has a light touch and there are times were you will laugh out loud. It’s a tale about pain and sorrow but it’s also a tale of recovery and redemption.

AV Education — Raashida Khan had worked in a bank and for NGOs and as she was approaching 50 she took a giant leap of faith and threw in the 9-to-5 towel and picked up a pen. With that decision she became a fulltime writer - and has two novels, a poetry anthology and a collection of short stories under her belt. Her first novel, Mirror Cracked, tells the story of Azraa Hassim a successful woman whose perfect life is shattered when she discovers her husband is having an affair. The book, which received an award, explores themes of betrayal, sexuality, homosexuality, drugs and mental health in the Muslim community.

AV Education — Bontle Senne loves feisty girls who kick butt and break gender stereotypes. She also loves the rich tradition of African mythology. And she loves writing. These triple loves led the celebrated author and literacy advocate to pen the four-part adventure fantasy series, the Shadow Chasers. The Shadow Chasers are warriors who have protected their villages for hundreds of years. They are fighting against an army of shadows; monsters in a spirit realm who are trying to break into the real world - and destroy it! It’s a deliciously delightful horror series for tweens - and even adults who enjoy escaping into a magical adventure.

AV Education — Ten years ago Judy Klipin was an unhappy, disillusioned, chronically stressed, seriously single, semi-employed consultant. Today she is a calm, settled, happy master life coach - and the author of two important books, Recover from your Childhood: Life Lessons for the Adult Child and Recover from Burnout. Judy has been waging a war against the scourge of burnout and with South Africa being one of the world’s most stressed countries she has had her work cut out for her. Now the world is turned upside down and in a few short months our lives have changed forever, making stress levels next level. In today’s episode of Amabookabooka, Judy explains how not to burn out in the age of lockdown.

AV Education — I Write, Said Fred: Fred Khumalo, according to one of his publishers, has been described as a ‘reluctant Zulu’, ‘clever black’ and an ‘equal opportunity offender’, but for Amabookabooka he is one of South Africa’s leading story tellers - who blends history and fiction into thrilling novels. He’s written 11 books. His first, Bitches Brew, turned 15 this year. His latest is The Longest March, which tells the tale of 7000 Zulu miners who walked for 10 days from Johannesburg to Ladysmith in 1899. Fred took this historical event and added a love triangle. He then showed that he’s not 'all talk and no walk' and followed in the footsteps of the miners, making the 350km journey by foot. He talks to us about the similarities between writing and walking, how he's keeping sane during the lockdown, and the worst person to be isolated with (spoiler alert: this person's name starts with an 'S' and ends with a 'teveHofmeyr').