Bubbles (Rahla Xenopoulos)

It’s a flimsy premise.

A beautiful young girl grows up on the wrong side of the tracks in 1940s South Africa. She moves to big, bold Joburg where an Orange Grove bookie takes her under his wing.

Having mastered the (tawdry) tricks required to ‘beguile’ a man, she joins a circle of rich but sinister young hotshots. Utterly out of her depth and completely mis-reading how high society works, Bubbles lands in real danger.

Flimsy yes, but a) exquisitely written with fascinating first-person narration, b) based on the true local mystery of the life and death of Bubbles Schroeder, whose murder has never been solved, and c) unputdownable in its flow and rhythm.

Here’s a quick sample:

“Wouldn’t you know, for all that hard work and self-educating, I misunderstood a lot of things in my short life. But he seemed so utterly taken with me, why, I still think that if he hadn’t had his friends with him that night, we may just have stood a chance. I had played myself so carefully, always careful to be gay and never have my own opinions. They don’t like it when a woman has her own opinion, you know. Better just to smile sweetly and agree with everything they say. Oh, a man never goes for a thinking girl, opinionated girls have absolutely no appeal.”

Another lovely part of this story is the setting: Lichtenburg, Vereeniging, Orange Grove, Rissik Street, Illovo, all circa mid-1940s.

Department store John Orrs is a hugely big deal. Real people travel by tram, but a select few drive cars. Artists live in ivy-tendrilled cottages in big gardens on Dunkeld’s Bompas Road. And there’s nothing finer than high tea at Anstey’s: sandwiches with the crusts cut off.

Bubbles says,

“The casuals sat around the card table…just talking. Not about me or races and bets, it was all about the Nats who had beaten Smuts at the polls. ‘It will just be vetkoek, not fettuccini, they won’t want Italians cooking,’ said Luigi, looking sombre. ‘There’s talk of them moving the black people out of town into shtetls,’ said one. ‘I think you’ll find you’re overreacting there,’ said another.”

This is a wonderful book. And a superb piece of local fiction. Read it. Please.

www.tiffanymarkman.co.za

Elephantoms: Tracking the Elephant (Lyall Watson)

Available at all good bookstores, courtesy of Penguin Books South Africa.

Lyall Watson is a well-known naturalist who lives in Ireland, but his youth was spent in South Africa, and this is where his lifelong fascination with elephants began. Elephantoms wanders across diverse terrain, drawing on history, anthropology, evolutionary theory and the author's experiences to illuminate the elephant world. Colourful anecdotes from animal trackers and wildlife researchers alternate with tidbits on elephant biology (the trunk can lift more than 450 kilograms) and behaviour (elephants mourn their dead: burying and revisiting the bones of family members). And above all, you close this book with a strong sense of having evolved as a human being. I absolutely loved it. And it's in my top 10. For life.

www.tiffanymarkman.co.za

The Well and the Mine (Gin Phillips)

Available at all good bookstores, courtesy of Penguin Books South Africa.

"After she threw the baby in, nobody believed me for the longest time. But I kept hearing that splash."

Wouldn't you chalish [Yiddish, v.: yearn] to read a book that started there? Well, I did. And it was worth it.

This, Gin Phillips' first novel, is set in a small coal mining town in Alabama in Depression-damaged 1931 - where little Tess Moore watches from her favourite night-time hiding place, the back porch, as a strange woman lifts the cover of the family well and without a word, tosses a baby in.

The story shifts narrators often and suddenly, which I usually don't like. But each of the characters (Albert, Tess's father; Leta, her mother; Virgie, her older sister; and tiny Jack, her baby brother) is so likeable and so real that this device soon becomes comfortable and indeed, useful.

Each in their own way, the family members try to get to the bottom of the baby in the well, all the while mildly disbelieving. And in the end, against the overarching tapestry of the hardest, hungriest of times in American history, they find the answer.

www.tiffanymarkman.co.za

Ways of Staying (Kevin Bloom)

Available at Exclusive Books and all good bookstores.

Reviewers usually don't buy books. Why would we? We're lucky and suitably smug buggers who typically take delivery of a large box every month - free, gratis, for nothing - thanks to the many superb publishers out there (Penguin, chief among them).

And since the arrival of my Kindle, I buy new books even less. But that's another self-satisfied rant for another day...

My point is that I bought Kevin Bloom's Ways of Staying. I didn't even have a book voucher. I took the money out of my purse and paid for it. (Which hurt. A lot.) It's not my usual choice of reading material, in that I'm not a wild fan of local authors, much less local journos who are much, much smarter than me and whose regular columns I seldom, if ever, understand. But the blurb spoke to me.

Here's why.

Like many, we've been thinking about emigration. In a vague, passive-aggressive, weak-willed sort of a way, but still. I've been moaning about how I didn't work this hard to move to Boston and be 'poor'. My husband's been whining about how shitty the service is here and how, in the States, you get Amazon deliveries the next day. To the front door. (We don't talk about crime. It's too real an issue.)

And Bloom's blurb ends thus:

"Ways of Staying is in the final analysis a love letter to a country that will not be forsaken. This is not only the story of why we stay, and how; it's the story of who we are."

So I brought the book home, took it on holiday with me a week or two later, and didn't put it down again til I was done. Oy vey. It's a ride and a half, through truth and lies and human suffering and humour and the tragedies of communities including my own tiny Jewish one. On the surface pretty harrowing, its content is surprisingly palatable, thanks to Bloom's interesting narrative style and on-the-ground insights.

Also, as he's a journo by day, he writes clean. None of the droning waffle, effusive adjective use and academiish you'd expect from someone with a Writing Fellowship.

I never like to give too much away in my reviews, so I won't here either. But my parting shot is this: if you've ever considered leaving the country because you feel like you can't take the drama any more; if you've even dwelt on the idea briefly and then put it out of your mind; or if you've had it and you're outta here, this brilliant book should be your next step. At the very least, you can read it on the plane.

www.tiffanymarkman.co.za