Pan Macmillan

Coming out at the tail end of this summer!

“In Last Summer the elegies of love are sung in measured and ironic tones. Higginson’s narrative poise, his understated and restrained emotional charge, are like cool air in our hot literary landscape.”
– Leon de Kock

It is summer in Stratford-upon-Avon. Thomas is a young theatre director at the Royal Shakespeare Company who is desperately in love with Lucy, the leading actress in a production of The Tempest. Their experiences are woven into the life of a theatre presided over by Harry, an ageing South African exile who becomes caught up in a history he sought to escape.

Hilarious and deeply affecting by turn, Thomas’s account is compelling in its lyricism, eccentricity and energetic attachment to life. Through him, we get to meet a colourful cast of characters and live through the gripping events of an ill-fated summer in Stratford.

“Writing believably about theatre folk is hard to pull off, given the slippery slope of their own fictional allegiances, but in Last Summer Craig Higginson manages with some panache a multi-layered love story filled with warmth and lyricism. I was captivated.”
– Janet Suzman, Actress

About the author

Craig Higginson is a novelist, playwright and theatre director. Currently he is the Literary Manager of the Market Theatre in Johannesburg and teaches writing at the University of the Witwatersrand. In the course of ten years spent in England, he worked at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford. Last Summer is his third novel.

Book details

• Last Summer by Craig Higginson
  EAN: 9781770101814
  Find this book with BOOK Finder!

The Citizen and Macmillan South Africa are proud to announce the winner of the Citizen Book Prize 2009 – the only book prize decided by the reading public.

The Wewelsburg Covenant by Johan Broens is a gripping World War 2-to-present-day account of one man’s conflict against his Nazi upbringing.

Swayed by an unintentional and undeniable love affair, James Trevellian’s choices will eventually decide the fate of the world.

• Read The Wewelsburg Covenant synopsis

There were almost 1 000 votes across all the titles in the final week, with The Wewelsburg Covenant receiving a record number of votes for this competition.

Macmillan have taken the decision to not publish the manuscript in its current form (a right detailed in the Prize conditions), but Johan Broens still receives a R10 000 cash prize and a writing course sponsored by Macmillan.

Broens looked back on the process he’s been through. “I wrote the novel, since it had been my ambition for nearly 10 years to do so. “I resigned my position at a consultancy to wholly spend my time devoted to the novel. I could not foresee any other way of writing it,” he says.

“I wrote on a fulltime basis, every day of the week, for four to eight hours per day, for seven weeks. Although I was confident of my writing abilities, I was even amazed at how readily the words flowed from my mind,” Broens says.

“Writing, to me, came naturally, most probably due to my passion for writing, my fertile imagination and very wide general knowledge. I have reached a stage in my life where I want to be creative. What could be more creative than writing a novel?” Broens says.

“It is my absolute ambition to be an author for the rest of my life.”

The Wewelsburg Covenant should find a large audience.

“My intended audience would be the same as those targeted through novels by authors such as Frederick Forsyth, Wilbur Smith, Tom Clancy, Harry Patterson, etc,” says Broens.

“The novel, I believe, would appeal to a wide variety of people, as it contains much intrigue and is closely associated with historical fact,” he says.

“Most importantly,“It is a novel which is believable. It has an authentic ring to it, making the reader believe that such events could have happened.

“It also, on a personal level, addresses an issue that many people face in today’s world, namely prejudice,” Broens says.

“And people generally enjoy reading books about secret organisations and novels that span over generations.”

Watch The Citizen’s CitiVibe for a full interview with Johan Broens and more news about The Wewelsburg Covenant.

Macmillan is proud and excited to announce that Conversations with Myself, the selected letters and diaries of Nelson Mandela, has been added to our non-fiction list.

This major new work covering almost the complete span of Madiba’s life will be published with the assistance and support of the Nelson Mandela Foundation.

The book dominated the recent Frankfurt Book Fair and its publication is set to be a worldwide event.

Madiba was recently the subject of an elegantly-written profile in the New York Times:

The icon is a very old man now. His hair is white, his body frail. Visitors say Nelson Mandela leans heavily on a cane when he walks into his study. He slips off his shoes, lowers himself into a stiff-backed chair and lifts each leg onto a cushioned stool. His wife, Graça, adjusts his feet “so they’re symmetrical, and gives him a peck,” says George Bizos, his old friend and lawyer.

To Mr. Mandela’s left is a small table piled with newspapers in English and Afrikaans, the language of the whites who imprisoned him for 27 years. Family and old comrades sit to his right, where his hearing is better. His memory has weakened, but he still loves to reminisce, bringing out oft-told stories “like polished stones,” as one visitor put it.

• Read the complete article

For more information on Conversations with Myself, please see the flyer above. We can’t wait to bring the book to you next year!

Photo courtesy the New York Times

The annual Steve Biko Memorial Lecture is given by Africa’s foremost scholars and artists, as well as religious and political leaders.

Each lecture is a resuscitative moment in which the enduring legacy and leadership of Steve Biko are explored in a contemporary context. Issues crucial to Biko, such as the inextricable link between the individual and society, as well as the challenges and opportunities facing many developing nations are examined in order to further define the mandate for the current generation of leaders.

This book is published in commemoration and celebration of the life and legacy of Steve Biko, in the hope that it will contribute to realising the purpose for which he lived and died: restoring people to their true humanity.

Contributors

Njabulo Ndebele
Zakes Mda
Chinua Achebe
Ngugi wa Thiong’o
Nelson Mandela
Mamphela Ramphele
Desmond Tutu
Thabo Mbeki
Trevor Manuel

Contents

Introduction, Nkosinathi Biko; 1. Iph’ Indlela? Finding our Way into the Future, Njabulo S Ndebele; 2. Biko’s Children, Zakes Mda; 3. Fighting Apartheid with Words, Chinua Achebe; 4. Recovering our Memory: South Africa in the Black Imagination, Ngugi wa Thiong’o; 5. Ten Years of Democracy: 1994–2004, Nelson Mandela; 6. Citizenship as Stewardship, Mamphela Ramphele; 7. South Africa: A Scintillating Success Waiting to Happen, Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu; 8. 30th Commemoration of Steve Biko’s Death, Thabo Mbeki; 9. Energising Democracy: Rights and Responsibilities, Former Minister Trevor Manuel

Book details

• The Steve Biko Memorial Lectures (Various Contributors)
  EAN: 9781770101630
  Find this book with BOOK Finder!

From the producers of Kaelo, the SABC2 television series that highlights social development in South Africa, comes the latest inspirational book that shows how ongoing, far-reaching social change is sweeping across South Africa as companies, individuals, non-governmental organisations and government come together to fight poverty, unemployment and underdevelopment in South Africa.

We trust that each story in the 2009 Kaelo: Stories of Hope book will not only give you a better understanding of the social development landscape in South Africa, but also inspire you to take action in helping to build our beautiful country.

Book details

• Kaelo: Stories of Hope, Working Together for a Brighter Future by Aïda Thorne, edited by Sarah Campbell
  EAN: 9781920075798
  Find this book with BOOK Finder!

“Ok, who is this guy? You said he’s not married, so if you’re knocked up, you have to tell who he is,” Linda insisted.

Thirtieth birthdays loom and soon there will be a Thirtieth Candle on a cake. Skeletons come creeping out closets, and author Angela Makholwa spins a tale that leads you to wonder how this birthday will end.

Linda has cast off yet another lover, while Dikeledi can’t seem to pin her fast-talking lawyer down to talk about marriage. Nolwazi has a secret – one she can’t share even with her closest friends, while Sade has found the perfect man, and a new life that will shut out the horrors of her past forever. Or will it…?

Linda, Dikeledi, Nolwazi and Sade are about to discover more than the wisdom that comes with being a year older. After all, they’re young, gifted and black in a booming new South Africa.

Author of the popular thriller, Red Ink, Angela Makholwa turns her wit and skill for page-turning suspense to the escapades and sexual misadventures of modern women as they search for happiness – and hope for love.
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Macmillan Publishers is delighted to announce a new partnership with The Citizen newspaper as the publisher driving the annual R10 000 Citizen Book Prize.

The prize is open to all first-time authors of both fiction and non-fiction works and includes the opportunity being published by Macmillan.*

The deadline for submissions is 1 August 2009. Here are the prize’s submission guidlines:

2009 Citizen Book Prize submission guidelines

All material must be typed. Please ensure all pages are numbered consecutively. No handwritten submissions will be considered. Please make sure to keep a copy of your submission – we cannot be held responsible for a manuscript that goes missing in the post. All submissions should be emailed to bookprize@citizen.co.za, or posted to Private Bag X 19, Northlands 2194.

Further submission notes and competition rules:
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Wilbur Smith’s success as an author of popular fiction may have come at a price, but it was one he was quite willing – and able – to pay.

The author, whose latest book, Assegai, still tops the SA charts, was born in Zambia but got started in Zimbabwe, where he was working as a chartered accountant. Now, he probably hires them by the dozen.

Here’s Smith’s “twenty questions” take on life, Cape Town and everything:
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In 2007, Kevin Bloom was described as “a committed (if sometimes nervous) observer of the South African experience”. His new book, Ways of Staying is the fruit of that commitment, a story at once deeply personal and edifyingly public, a journey into the heart of a country that remains riven and undefined.

Comparisons with Rian Malan’s My Traitor’s Heart have been forthcoming, but perhaps not entirely apt, because the context is different: if anything, the relationship that South African whites have with their country has gotten more complex since 1994. Ways of Staying inhabits the gray areas of South Africa’s “second transition”. It turns answers into questions; it also helps us imagine a kinder future.

Here are two features on the author put together by Tymon Smith, a podcast and an in-depth interview:
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Wilbur Smith’s Assegai has been number one on the SA book charts for weeks. Pan Macmillan is pleased to bring you this excerpt.

It is 1913 and ex-soldier turned professional big game hunter, Leon Courtney, is in British East Africa guiding rich and powerful men from America and Europe on safaris in the Masai tribe territories. But Leon had not bargained for falling passionately in love with Eva, the Count’s beautiful and enigmatic mistress.

Read on for an excerpt from the book:
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