Book Choice - April 2017

It’s the first Monday of the month, so it’s BOOK CHOICE on Fine Music Radio 101.3, various other frequencies and on our web: www.fmr.co.za. I’m Gorry Bowes Taylor. This happy hour: Andrew Marjoribanks, Wordsworth Books gives us choice reading in fiction and non-fiction for these early autumn days. Philip Todres chats to internationally acclaimed photographer Roger Ballen about his new, intriguingly named monograph: The Theatre of Apparitions, a copy of which publisher Thames & Hudson is giving away in our easy-peasy competition. Beverley Roos Muller highly recommends the spellbindingly brilliant The Iceberg – A Memoir by Marion Coutts, while Mike Fitzjames so wickedly whacks our nerves with two spellbinding thrillers. Vanessa Levenstein escaped into non-fiction No Wall Too High: One man’s extraordinary escape from Mao’s Darkest Prison by Xu Hongci. Melvyn Minnaar turns his embedded gaze to two art books: Hanging on a Wire, photographs by Sophia Klaase and 1994 with photographs by Pieter Hugo. We chat to entomologist Erik Holm about the amazingly sophisticated and technological world of southern African insects detailed in his unputdownable Insectopedia. Publisher Struik is giving away a copy to a lucky winner. Phillippa Cheifitz hauntingly finds District Six Huis Kombuis more than a cookbook, it’s a social history of a community displaced, while Cindy Moritz is moved by the tale and the stylish telling in The Park by local writer Gail Schimmel. Do listen up for our easy-peasy competition question to win one of two R200 Wordsworth Books vouchers, or Roger Ballen’s The Theatre of Apparitions or Erik Holm’s Insectopedia. Andrew Marjoribanks, a beguiling bundle of books, fiction and non-fiction, from Wordsworth Books.