Tatamkhulu Afrika The Innocents (Africasouth, SA) Set in the struggle years, this novel examines the moral and ethical issues of the time from a Muslim perspective.
Mark Behr The Smell of Apples (Abacus, UK). A best-selling novel about a small white boy growing up in a military family under apartheid in the 1970s, and painfully resonant for many.
Herman Charles Bosman Unto Dust (Human & Rousseau, SA). A superb collection of short stories from South Africa's master of the genre, all set in the tiny Afrikaner farming district of Groot Marico in the 1930s, with the narrator Oom Schalk Lourens revealing with delicious irony the passions and foibles of his community.
André Brink A Chain of Voices (Minerva, UK). The superbly evocative tale of Cape eighteenth-century life, exploring the impact of slavery on one farming family, right up to its dramatic and murderous end.
J.M. Coetzee Age of Iron (Penguin, UK/US). Voted by writers in a Mail & Guardian poll to be the finest South African novel of the last ten years, this depicts a white female classics professor dying from cancer during the political craziness of the 1980s. She is joined by a tramp who sets up home in the garden, and thus evolves a curious and fascinating relationship that transforms her.
Achmat Dangor The Z Town Trilogy (Ravan, SA). One of the best Cape Town writers, Dangor sets this trilogy in a town much like it, during one of apartheid South Africa's many states of emergency, which have started to burrow in intricate ways into the psyches of his characters.
Modikwe Dikobe Marabi Dance (Heinemann, UK). A short novel celebrating the bittersweet nature of black Johannesburg life in the 1930s, where the daily humiliations of life are tempered by the prospect of wild marabi parties when the weekends come.
Nadine Gordimer July's People (Penguin, UK/US). A liberal white family is rescued by its gardener July from revolution, and taken to his home village for safety, where Gordimer teases out the power dynamics of this fraught situation with customary insight and eloquence.
Dan Jacobson The Trap, and a Dance in the Sun (David Philip, SA). Two taut novellas written in the 1950s in one volume, skilfully portraying the developing tensions and nuances of the white-versus-black lives of the era.
Douglas Killam and Ruth Rowe The Companion to African Literature (James Currey). As its title implies, this book, published in 2000, comprises details of significant African writers, as well as more general articles on issues such as Negritude or publishing in Africa. There are bibliographies, plus brief critical commentaries on individual authors. If you want to know who wrote what and when, this is the book for you.
Alex La Guma A Walk in the Night (Heinemann, UK). An evocative collection of short stories by this talented political activist/author, set in District Six, the ethnically mixed quarter of Cape Town razed by the apartheid government,
Anne Landsman The Devil's Chimney (Granta; Penguin). A stylish and entertaining piece of magic realism about the Southern Cape town of Outshoorn in the days of the ostrich-feather boom.
Zakes Mda Ways of Dying (OUP, UK). Winner of the 1997 M-Net Book Prize, this brilliant tale of a professional mourner is full of sly insights into the culture of black South Africa.
Thomas Mofolo Chaka (Heinemann, UK). Thomas Mofolo was Lesotho's first great fiction writer, who wrote this epic tale in Sotho of the Zulu king Shaka in 1909, here portrayed as a man fatally controlled by his strong passions. The original English translation gave the text a misleadingly biblical slant, which has been corrected in this newer translation by Daniel Kunene.
Isaac Mogotsi Alexandra Tales (Ravan, SA). Delightful tales of family life in the run-down, lively homes of Johannesburg's Alexandra township, all with a clever and provocative twist in the tail.
Es'kia Mpahalele Down Second Avenue (Faber & Faber, UK). A classic autobiographical novel set in the 1940s in the impoverished township of Alexandra, where Mpahalele grew up as part of a large extended family battling daily to survive the problems and injustices of the age.
Alan Paton Cry, the Beloved Country (Penguin, UK). Classic novel by one of South Africa's great liberals, describing with tremendous lyricism the journey of a black pastor from rural Natal to Johannesburg, depicted as a veritable Sodom and Gomorrah, to rescue his missing son from its clutches.
Kathy Perkins Black South African Women - An Anthology of Plays (Routledge, UK) Groundbreaking collection of ten plays by a wide range of known and unknown playwrights such as Gcina Mhlope, Sindiwe Nagona, Muthal Naidoo and Lueen Conning.
Sol Plaatje Mhudi (Heinemann, UK). The first English novel by a South African writer, Mhudi is the epic story, set in the 1830s, of a young Barolong woman who saves her future husband from the raids of the Ndebele, at a time when the Afrikaner Great Trek had just begun. Plaatje was also a political activist and was one of the founder members of the ANC.
Linda Rode Crossing Over (Kwela, SA) Collection of 26 stories by new and emerging South African writers on the experiences of adolescence and early adulthood in a period of political transition.
Olive Schreiner Story of an African Farm (Penguin, UK/US). The first-ever South African novel, Schreiner wrote this in 1883 under a male pseudonym. Though subject to the ideologies of the era, the book nonetheless explores with genuinely open vision the tale of two female cousins living on a remote Karoo farm whose young lives are disrupted by an Irish traveller.
Sipho Sepamla A Ride on the Whirlwind (Heinemann, UK). Set in the terrifying times of 1976 in riot-swept Soweto, Sepamla's novel examines the psychology of resistance and defiance amongst the angry township youth.
Mongane Wally Serote To Every Birth Its Blood (Heinemann, UK). Serote's only novel is a powerfully turbulent affair that traces the evolution of a township man from someone interested only in jazz, drinking and sex, to political consciousness through the humiliations he is subjected to by the forces of authority.
Martin Trump and Jean Marquard (eds) A Century of South African Short Stories (Ad Donker, SA). A selection of South Africa's finest short stories, including contributions from Drum writer Can Themba, Charles Bosman and Nadine Gordimer.
Marlene van Niekerk Triomf (Johnathan Ball, SA; Little, Brown & Co, UK). Award-winning Afrikaans novel translated into South African English as well as a less idiomatic form for the overseas market. Tells the colourful and tragic story of a family of poor whites living in the emblematic Johannesburg suburb of Triomf, built on the ruins of the black enclave of Sophiatown.
Ivan Vladislavic The Restless Supermarket (David Philip, SA). A dark and intricate urban satire about Johannesburg's notorious Hillbrow district during the last days of apartheid.
Zoe Wicombe You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town (David Philip, SA 1987). Wicombe's short stories are remarkable for her sense of realism and the subtle way in which she produces work where social concern is transparent, humour is demonstrable, and yet which avoids the heavy-handedness of most anti-apartheid protest literature.
