TOP 10 SOUTH AFRICAN NOVELS

The Story of an African Farm by Olive Schreiner First published in 1883, this depiction of life on an isolated farm in the Karoo is remarkable not only for the beauty of its descriptive writing, but for the radical and feminist ideas expressed by its free-spirited heroine, Lyndall. Cry the Beloved Country by Alan Paton Read More

FIFA World Cup 2010 – South Africa

With only a few days to go before the FIFA World Cup opens in Cape Town, South Africa is back in the news – and for reasons (generally) more positive than hitherto. Instead of the stories – all too familiar in recent years – of corruption, ANC infighting, and escalating street crime, there are heartening Read More

Literary models for The Dark Tower

Writing The Dark Tower necessitated a good deal of historical research – not all of which was factual. Novels, such as The American by Henry James, The Duke’s Children by Anthony Trollope, A Pair of Blue Eyes and The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy, The Egoist by Meredith – all of which were Read More

The quest for Isandhlwana

If the starting-point for The Dark Tower was a few handwritten pages in a long-dead woman’s diary for 1879, the process of writing the novel brought in many other elements. There was the fact that the story was set at a particular time in history; that it was set in a country I had not at that time visited; and that it was about war. All these facts, I knew, would involve me in a good deal of research, both of the kind that involves sitting in libraries, and the kind that’s about going to see for oneself. It wasn’t the first time I’d done such research – a previous novel Fabulous Time, part of which is set in Shanghai in 1911, had necessitated a visit to China – but it was the most sustained and ambitious work of its kind I’d so far attempted. Read More

Isandhlwana – The Dark Tower

Isandhlwana is a disturbing place. Even if one knows nothing of the grim events enacted here, a little over 130 years ago, it still leaves a powerful impression – with its barren outcrops of low hills, surrounding a grassy plain, seamed with dry river-beds, and with the squat, tower-like shape of the mountain, from which it takes its name, looming overhead. It is the landscape evoked, with eerie prescience, by Robert Browning, in his 1855 poem, ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’, which supplied me with the title, and epigraph, for my novel, The Dark Tower. Read More

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