Book Choice - June 2018

This cheerful hour Andrew Marjoribanks cheers us with great choices in Wordsworth Books fiction and non-fiction. And, for the first time, we review an app as John Hanks is cheerfully aflutter about Steve Woodhall’s Butterflies of South Africa. This beautiful and engaging app is also one of our Giveaways today. Vanessa Levenstein is cheered by her chat with Mick Herron about his dark, politically incorrect, poetic and hysterically funny, London Rules, the latest spy thriller in the Slough House series. Legal eagle, police reservist and writer Andrew Brown found William Boyd’s The Dreams of Bethan Mellmouth searingly clever – and humorous. Phillippa Cheifitz raises a cheer for Any Time Ile de Pain’s celebrity cook Liesi Mulder’s new cookbook from that famed café emporium in Knysna. Mike Fitjames, mean as ever, unsettles your nerves with three new thrillers, and Philip Todres takes on art mover and shaker Natalie Knight’s biography – The Big Picture – an Art-O-Biography. It’s both a personal memoir and an overview of Natalie’s contribution to the South African arts and culture landscape. Cindy Moritz was much moved by the beautiful and illuminating tale of the Holocaust tattooist and the woman he loved in The Tattooist of Auschwitz, and finally Peter Soal was cheerfully shocked by Robin Renwick’s How to Steal a Country - which describes the vertiginously rapid descent of political leadership in South Africa.