Here is the story of Mary and the Girls, of Zoot, Pretty-Boy and Oubaas, of the Abrahams family who came from Bo-Kaap, of Last-Knight the barber and his prim wife. This novel is written in tribute to the people of District Six so that we do not forget.
"District Six was an area of Cape Town that was inhabited by poor people of different racial backgrounds, but particularly Coloureds and Malays, until the 1960s. This novel tells the story over 15 years of a group of people who lived in a row of houses called Buckingham Palace. Slowly their lives become affected by the Group Areas Act, which designated District Six as a white-only district. Buckingham Palace, District Six shows the heavy price individuals and communities had to pay under the apartheid regime of South Africa."--Page 4 of cover.
Richard Moore Rive (1930-1989) was a writer, scholar, literary critic and college teacher in Cape Town, South Africa. He is best known for his short stories written in the late 1950s and for his second novel, 'Buckingham Palace', District Six, in which he depicted the well-known cosmopolitan area of District Six, where he grew up. In this biography Shaun Viljoen, a former colleague of Rive's, creates the composite qualities of a man who was committed to the struggle against racial oppression and to the ideals of non-racialism but was also variously described as irascible, pompous and arrogant, with a 'cultivated urbanity'. Beneath these public personae lurked a constant and troubled awareness of his dark skin colour and guardedness about his homosexuality. Using his own and others' memories, and drawing on Rive's fiction, Viljoen brings the author to life with sensitivity and empathy. The biography follows Rive from his early years in the 1950s, writing for Drum magazine and spending time in the company of great anti-establishment writers such as Jack Cope, Ingrid Jonker, Jan Rabie, Marjorie Wallace, Es'kia Mphahlele and Nadine Gordimer, to his acceptance at Magdalene College, Oxford, where he completed his doctorate on Olive Schreiner, before returning to South Africa to resume his position as senior lecturer at Hewat College of Education. This biography will resurface Richard Rive the man and the writer, and invite us to think anew about how we read writers who lived and worked during the years of apartheid.
Ken Follett’s magnificent historical epic begins as five interrelated families move through the momentous dramas of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the struggle for women’s suffrage. A thirteen-year-old Welsh boy enters a man’s world in the mining pits. . . . An American law student rejected in love finds a surprising new career in Woodrow Wilson’s White House. . . . A housekeeper for the aristocratic Fitzherberts takes a fateful step above her station, while Lady Maud Fitzherbert herself crosses deep into forbidden territory when she falls in love with a German spy. . . . And two orphaned Russian brothers embark on radically different paths when their plan to emigrate to America falls afoul of war, conscription, and revolution. From the dirt and danger of a coal mine to the glittering chandeliers of a palace, from the corridors of power to the bedrooms of the mighty, Fall of Giants takes us into the inextricably entangled fates of five families—and into a century that we thought we knew, but that now will never seem the same again. . . .
Clemency Shaw, the wife of a prominent doctor, has died in a tragic fire in the peaceful suburb of Highgate. But the blaze was set by an arsonist, and it is unclear whether she or Dr. Shaw was the intended victim—or did the doctor himself set the blaze in order to inherit his wife’s large fortune? Baffled by the scarcity of clues in this terrible crime, Inspector Thomas Pitt turns to the people who had been closest to the couple—Clemency’s stuffy but distinguished relatives. Meanwhile, Pitt’s wellborn wife, Charlotte, retraces the dangerous path that Clemency walked in the last months of her life, finding herself enmeshed in a sinister web that stretches from the lowest slums to the loftiest centers of power.
It is a quiet, uneventful Saturday in Doncaster. Nick Aten, and his best friend Steve Price – troubled seventeen year olds – spend it as usual hanging around the sleepy town, eating fast food and planning their revenge on Tug Slatter, a local bully and their arch-enemy. But by Sunday, Tug Slatter becomes the last of their worries because somehow overnight civilization is in ruins. Adults have become murderously insane – literally. They're infected with an uncontrollable urge to kill the young. Including their own children. As Nick and Steve try to escape the deadly town covered with the mutilated bodies of kids, a group of blood-thirsty adults ambushes them. Just a day before they were caring parents and concerned teachers, today they are savages destroying the future generation. Will Nick and Steve manage to escape? Is their hope that outside the Doncaster borders the world is 'normal' just a childish dream? Blood Crazy, first published in 1995, is a gripping, apocalyptic horror from Simon Clark.
Nell W. Mohney, adapted from the Introduction: "In seminars I have conducted over a thirty-year period, I have discovered that the quality most wanted by Americans is happiness. Many of those seminar participants drove to the seminars in luxury cars, and they looked well fed and well dressed. Yet, individually, they often expressed disappointment with life and admitted to having a feeling of emptiness. They wanted, and even felt entitled to, more happiness.... I am one of those who truly believe that the basic answer to happiness is a spiritual one. We are made for God, and as Saint Augustine said, “Our hearts are restless ‘til they rest in thee.” All parts of our personalities are drawn to wholeness and happiness when Christ is resident within. In studying the life of Christ, I remembered that although Jesus was a man of sorrow and acquainted with grief, more than anything else he was a person of joy and happiness.... Even his purpose in coming into the world is revealed in John 10:10: “I came that they might have life and have it abundantly.” This abundant life, I believe, is not just in the world to come but in the here and now, where a series of committed choices can cause your spirit to sing."