100 Best South Africa Books of All Time
We've researched and ranked the best south africa books in the world, based on recommendations from world experts, sales data, and millions of reader ratings. Learn more
Bill GatesAs a longtime fan of The Daily Show, I loved reading this memoir about how its host honed his outsider approach to comedy over a lifetime of never quite fitting in. Born to a black South African mother and a white Swiss father in apartheid South Africa, he entered the world as a biracial child in a country where mixed race relationships were forbidden. Much of Noah’s story of growing up in South... (Source)
Mark SusterPlease don't read @Trevornoah's book "Born a Crime." It's such a remarkable story that you need to hear him narrate it on @audible_com. You'll laugh out loud, cry, get angry, be in disbelief. You'll have many "driveway moments" where you can't stop even though you're home (Source)
Heather ZynczakSo excited for our latest speaker announcement for #PSLIVE19! Trevor Noah! I am a huge @TheDailyShow fan! And his book -Born a Crime -and life story are amazing. Can't wait! Join us! https://t.co/N6ykJq7TOy https://t.co/r0dIx5RFVI (Source)
Since his triumphant release in 1990 from more than a quarter-century of imprisonment, Mandela has been at the center of the most compelling and inspiring political drama in the world. As president of the African National Congress and head of South Africa's anti-apartheid movement, he was instrumental in moving the nation toward multiracial... more
Richard BransonToday is World Book Day, a wonderful opportunity to address this #ChallengeRichard sent in by Mike Gonzalez of New Jersey: Make a list of your top 65 books to read in a lifetime. (Source)
Barack ObamaAs 2018 draws to a close, I’m continuing a favorite tradition of mine and sharing my year-end lists. It gives me a moment to pause and reflect on the year through the books I found most thought-provoking, inspiring, or just plain loved. It also gives me a chance to highlight talented authors – some who are household names and others who you may not have heard of before. Here’s my best of 2018... (Source)
Bianca BelairFor #BHM I will be sharing some of my favorite books by Black Authors 21st Book: Long Walk to Freedom -Nelson Mandela Read about his journey from childhood to the struggles of living under apartheid to becoming a freedom fighter & leader of his country. He is inspirational! https://t.co/bdvZu0kbh0 (Source)
For a time, his daughter's influence and the natural rhythms of the farm promise to harmonise his discordant life. But the balance of power in the country is shifting. He and Lucy become... more
Kevin BloomThis book was written in the late 90s and although it is very difficult – especially with writers like J M Coetzee – to link the work to the man, my personal reading of the book is that it is a work of profound disappointment and sadness. It is all about a fifty-something professor, David Lurie, who teaches at a Cape Town university. He has an affair with a young student – Melanie. He gets hauled... (Source)
Justin CartwrightThe book is a sort of farewell note to South Africa – a Goodbye, I’m off. (Source)
Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply. Let him not laugh too gladly when the water runs through his fingers, nor stand too silent when the setting sun makes red the veld with fire. Let him not be too moved when the birds of his land are singing, nor give... more
Cecile RichardsIt’s a novel – I know that was sort of cheating a little bit. (Source)
Philip GourevitchIt goes deep, deep, deep into individual lives, which I increasingly have come to believe is the only way that we can understand these large, political shapes, particularly in stories that are foreign to us. (Source)
Murtaza Mohammad HussainThis is an amazing book I’d never heard of. I feel it should be read by all Americans but even more so people from countries like Israel that are governed according to a system of racial caste https://t.co/0zSBlWTsY2 (Source)
Kevin BloomRian was commissioned by Random House to go and write the story of the history of his clan, but he realised 100 pages in that the story was actually a memoir and it was about his struggle. (Source)
Imraan CoovadiaWaiting for the Barbarians was the Coetzee book that I was always most attached to – I think it’s the Coetzee book that most South Africans are attached to. Coetzee takes the mood of the 1980s state of emergency – when people were being detained and disappearing and there was a fear of communist or black madness on the borders – and he makes it more interesting by creating this partial allegory... (Source)
'This is a truly astonishing novel... I finished Life & Times of Michael K in a state... more
Samantha HarveyAn absolutely devastating read from the first page, but you can’t put it down. It’s a terrible and beautiful story about a man whose mother is dying. (Source)
Kevin BloomThis is an astounding work of nonfiction. Antjie is one of South Africa’s most important Afrikaans poets. This was her first full book-length work of English prose. She worked as a journalist for the South African Broadcasting Corporation at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and she went around the country listening to testimony of victims of apartheid and families of people who had been... (Source)
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Ben Du Toit is a white schoolteacher in suburban Johannesburg in a dark time of intolerance and state-sanctioned apartheid. A simple, apolitical man, he believes in the essential fairness of the South African government and its policies—until the sudden arrest and subsequent "suicide" of a black janitor from Du Toit's school. Haunted... more
Richard BransonToday is World Book Day, a wonderful opportunity to address this #ChallengeRichard sent in by Mike Gonzalez of New Jersey: Make a list of your top 65 books to read in a lifetime. (Source)
In order to save their lives, Anthony took them in. In the years that followed he became a part of their family. And as he battled to create a bond with the elephants, he came to realize that they had a great deal to teach him about life, loyalty,... more
In 1985, Nelson Mandela, then in prison for twenty-three years, set about winning over the fiercest proponents of apartheid, from his jailers to the head of South Africa's military. First he earned his freedom and then he won the presidency in the nation's first free election in 1994. But he knew that South Africa was still dangerously divided by almost fifty years of... more
Alec RussellJohn Carlin’s book focuses on this extraordinary sporting event, the Rugby World Cup final in 1995. Rugby was, in South Africa, a game primarily for whites. Some black South Africans played, but it was very much a game dominated by the Afrikaners. (Source)
I Write What I Like contains a selection of Biko's writings from 1969, when he became the... more
Nadine Gordimer was a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature less
Colleen MurphyGobodo-Madikizela gives invaluable insight into the psychology of perpetrators, the psychological impacts on victims of horrific atrocities, and how we think about possibilities for moving forward as a community post-atrocity. (Source)
Jessica SternThis is a complicated and moving book about the nature of good and evil. Pumla is a South African psychologist who spent a lot of time in prison interviewing people like Eugene de Kock, the commanding officer of state-sanctioned apartheid death squads. He is currently serving 212 years in jail for crimes against humanity. He directed ‘the blood, the bodies and the killing’ against apartheid’s... (Source)
Don't have time to read the top South Africa books of all time? Read Shortform summaries.
Shortform summaries help you learn 10x faster by:
- Being comprehensive: you learn the most important points in the book
- Cutting out the fluff: you focus your time on what's important to know
- Interactive exercises: apply the book's ideas to your own life with our educators' guidance.
At age twenty-four, Winston Churchill was utterly convinced it was his destiny to become prime minister of England one day, despite the fact he had just lost his first election campaign for Parliament. He believed that to achieve his goal he must do something spectacular on the battlefield. Despite deliberately putting himself in extreme danger as a... more
JOHN ?SPUD? MILTON takes his first hilarious steps toward manhood in this delicious, laugh-out-loud boarding school romp, full of midnight swims, raging hormones, and catastrophic holidays that will leave the entire family in hysterics and thirsty for more! less
Imraan CoovadiaIn our country, even the white writers have unpronounceable names. It’s about a South African boarding school, a pseudo British school – like the one I attended, which pretended it was Harrow – where life is regulated by rules, hierarchy and a mix of proud and humiliating traditions. People in South Africa, particularly white South Africans, love these schools. They get rid of their children as... (Source)
Mary Turner is a self-confident, independent young woman who becomes the depressed, frustrated wife of an ineffectual, unsuccessful farmer. Little by little the ennui of years on the farm work their slow poison, and Mary's despair progresses until the fateful arrival of an enigmatic and virile black servant, Moses. Locked in anguish, Mary and Moses -- master and slave -- are trapped in a web of mounting attraction and... more
A... more
Jonny SteinbergIt’s about an old white woman and her young black maid, Agaat – about their relationship and what happens between them. That’s the basic story but there are extraordinary things happening allegorically. If you look at the cultural artefacts that these women are fighting over, are communicating over, they are bastion symbols of Afrikanerdom – farming, because the white women farm, and tapestry and... (Source)
John CarlinThe author is JM Coetzee, the Nobel prize-winning author and, in my view, one of the top five living writers in the English language. Age of Iron is quite a short book – you could probably read it in a couple of hours. It’s set in mid-1980s South Africa, a time of tremendous political ferment. Mandela was imprisoned in 1964 and what followed for the next 10 years was a grave-like quiet of... (Source)
Jonny SteinbergYes, The Heart of Redness is set in the early post-apartheid period and it’s about a black man who is in exile and he comes home and finds that he isn’t sufficiently connected to the new elite to do well. He goes off to a rural province in the Eastern Cape in pursuit of a girl to try and make a life there. This story is intertwined with another story, an old very famous historical story in South... (Source)
...Identification with everything that lives is impossible without self-purification; without self-purification, the observance of the law of Ahimsa must remain an empty dream; God can never be realised by one who is not pure of heart. Self-purification, therefore, must remain purification in all walks of life. And purification being... more
Barack ObamaAccording to the president’s Facebook page and a 2008 interview with the New York Times, this title is among his most influential forever favorites. (Source)
Tim CookI have two books going right now: One is the Bobby Kennedy book [“Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon,” by Larry Tye] that just came out. The other is quite an old book. It’s a Gandhi book [“Mohandas K. Gandhi, Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments With Truth”] that I got interested in because we went to the Gandhi museum when we were in India recently. I tend to like nonfiction and... (Source)
Cory BookerA profound read. (Source)
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Life under Apartheid has created a secure future for Robin Conrad, a nine-year-old white girl living with her parents in 1970s Johannesburg. In the same nation but worlds apart, Beauty Mbali, a Xhosa woman in a rural village in the Bantu homeland of the Transkei, struggles to raise her children alone after her husband's death. Both lives have been built upon the division of race, and their meeting... more
'Something always dies when the lion feeds and yet there is meat for those that follow him.' The lion is Sean, hero of this tremendous drama of the men who took possession of South Africa in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
Sean and his twin-brother Garrick grew up on their father's farm in Natal. The first part of the book deals with his childhood and youth and his longing to become a successful farmer and hard-hitting fighter like his father.
The tough life of cattle-farming is brusquely interrupted by the Zulu Wars,... more
Turtle BunburyYes, it is the first of the Courtney sagas. Lots of school boys get hooked on Wilbur Smith, and there are of course grown men who love them too, so he seems to go across the board. I started reading him when I was about 14 or 15, and now the series runs to about 12 or 13 books. I thought it was brilliantly clever. It is like a soap opera where every book is the next chapter of the story. (Source)
Nombeko Mayeki was never meant to be a hero. Born in a Soweto shack, she seemed destined for a short, hard life. But now she is on the run from the world ‘s most ruthless secret service, with three Chinese sisters, twins who are officially one person and an elderly potato farmer. Oh, and the fate of the King of Sweden - and the world - rests on her shoulders.
As uproariously funny as Jonas Jonasson’s bestselling debut, this is an entrancing tale of luck, love and international relations. less
One of the world's preeminent playwrights, who could be a primary candidate for either the Nobel Prize in Literature or the Nobel Peace Prize (Mel Gussow, The New Yorker), Athol Fugard is renowned for his relentless explorations of personal and political survival in apartheid South Africa... more
Jare later is dit Benjamin / Lukas self wat worstel met die vraag: wie is ek? less
Don't have time to read the top South Africa books of all time? Read Shortform summaries.
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When Cathleen Harrington leaves her home in Ireland in 1919 to travel to South Africa, she knows that she does not love the man she is to marry there —her fiance Edward, whom she has not seen for five years. Isolated and estranged in a small town in the harsh Karoo desert, her only real companions are her diary and her housemaid, and later the housemaid's daughter, Ada. When Ada is born, Cathleen recognizes in her someone she can love and respond to in a... more
As Zuma fights for his political life following the 2017 Gupta emails leak, this cabal – the president’s keepers – ensures that after years of ruinous rule, he remains in power and out of prison. But is Zuma the puppet master, or their puppet?
Journey with Pauw as he explores the shadow mafia state. From KwaZulu-Natal and the Western... more
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Imani PerryW.E.B. Du Bois was the father of American sociology and one of the most influential intellectuals of the twentieth century. His classic text, The Souls of Black Folk, was published in 1903. Black Reconstruction in America came thirty years later. (Source)
But one day an unforeseen event forces the women together. And gradually the bickering and sniping softens into lively debate, and from there into memories shared. But could these sparks of connection ever transform into friendship? Or is it too late to expect these two to change? less
Tandia is a child of Africa: half Indian, half African, beautiful and intelligent, she is only sixteen when she is first brutalised by the police. Her fear of the white man leads her to join the black resistance movement, where she trains as a terrorist.
With her in the fight for justice is the one white man Tandia can trust, the welterweight champion of the world, Peekay. Now he must fight their common enemy in order to save... more
Being hired by reclusive music producer Odi Huron to find a teenybop pop star should be her ticket out of Zoo City, the festering slum where the criminal underclass and their animal companions live in the shadow of hell’s undertow.
Instead, it catapults Zinzi deeper into the maw of a city twisted by crime and magic, where... more
The body of a beautiful seventeen-year-old Zulu girl, Amahle, is found covered in wildflowers on a hillside in the Drakensberg Mountains, halfway between her father’s compound and the enormous white-owned farm where she worked. Detective Sergeant Cooper and Detective Constable Samuel Shabalala are sent to the desolate... more
Don't have time to read the top South Africa books of all time? Read Shortform summaries.
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So lui die dreigbrief aan die SAPS. En dan begin die jagtog. Bennie Griessel is die een wat die dossier moet heropen. Die saak is 40 dae oud, die spoor is koud. Daar's geen motief nie, geen leidrade nie, net 'n reeks naakfoto's, 'n hoogs ingewikkelde saketransaksie, en onmenslike druk van topbestuur, die media en die meedoenlose, onpeilbare sluipskutter. En deur dit alles moet Griessel sy nuwe vriendin, die sangeres Alexa Barnard, weghou van die bottel voor haar groot terugkeer-konsert,... more
But this is a ruthless world of avarice and exploitation, where the spoils of the... more
Imraan CoovadiaHillbrow is a notorious suburb of Johannesburg. Johannesburg, as far as I can tell, is the most notorious city in the world. Hillbrow is Johannesburg’s Johannesburg. People in Johannesburg are scared to go to Hillbrow, even those that live there. (Source)
He befriends Sizwe, a young local man who refuses to be tested for AIDS despite the existence of a well-run testing and anti-retroviral... more
In a squatter camp on the outskirts of Johannesburg, seventeen-year-old Zodwa lives in desperate poverty, under the shadowy threat of a civil war and a growing AIDS epidemic. Eight months pregnant, Zodwa carefully guards secrets that jeopardize her life.
Across the country, wealthy... more
Combining compelling insights into the sinister side of modern life with a riveting tale of international intrigue, The White Lioness keeps you on the knife-edge of suspense. less
Jock's owner was a young transport rider in the rugged and colourful days of the Transvaal gold rush. Those were the days when big game roamed the land and each sunrise brought a new adventure.
The story of the bull terrier who... more
Justin CartwrightThe book teaches you that your priorities are not necessarily the priorities of the land or the people that you find yourself in. That’s what makes it a very good book I think. (Source)
Don't have time to read the top South Africa books of all time? Read Shortform summaries.
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- Interactive exercises: apply the book's ideas to your own life with our educators' guidance.
"One of those depth charge plays [that] has... more
Lemmer is a freelance Invisible. The tiny and beautiful Emma le Roux, a brand consultant from Cape Town, wants to hire him. He needs the money, so he listens to her story. Lemmer’s First General Law is: Don’t get involved. But he has never failed as a body guard and he’s also grown a little too... more
One Sunday morning, as Maria savours the breeze through the kitchen window whilst making apricot jam, she hears the screech and bump that announces the arrival of her good friend and editor Harriet. What Maria doesn't realise is that Harriet is about to deliver the first ingredient in two new recipes (recipes for love and murder) and a whole basketful of challenges.
A delicious blend of intrigue, milk tart and... more
Raised in Pennsylvania, Thandi views the world of her mother’s childhood in Johannesburg as both impossibly distant and ever present. She is an outsider wherever she goes, caught between being black and white, American and not. She tries to connect these dislocated pieces of her life, and as her mother succumbs to cancer, Thandi searches for an anchor—someone, or something, to love.
In arresting and... more
DURBAN, SOUTH AFRICA, 1953. Forced to resign from his position of Detective Sergeant and re-classified as 'mixed race' after an incident involving a young black woman, Emmanuel Cooper winds up powerless and alone in the tough coastal city of Durban, mixing labouring with surveillance work for his old boss, Major van Nickerk. Patrolling the freight yards one night, he stumbles upon the body of a young white boy and the detective in him cannot, or will not, walk away. When two more... more
The ambitious Hatshepsut is willing to become Pharaoh at any cost, even when the price must be paid with her body and... more
from 1876 to 1912 less
Alec RussellI first went to South Africa in an extraordinary, tumultuous time, just before the end of apartheid. It was May 1993, and no one was quite sure what way the country was headed. So my first year there was spent covering the very traumatic final year of white rule and the rise to power of the ANC, and then I stayed on for another four years covering Mandela’s presidency as a foreign correspondent. (Source)
Don't have time to read the top South Africa books of all time? Read Shortform summaries.
Shortform summaries help you learn 10x faster by:
- Being comprehensive: you learn the most important points in the book
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- Interactive exercises: apply the book's ideas to your own life with our educators' guidance.
Eleanor Morse’s rich and intimate portrait of Botswana, and of three people whose intertwined lives are at once tragic and remarkable, is an absorbing and deeply moving story.
In apartheid South Africa in 1976, medical student Isaac Muthethe is forced to flee his country after witnessing a friend murdered by white members of the South African Defense Force. He is smuggled into Botswana, where he is hired as a gardener by a young American woman, Alice... more
Every city has an unspoken side. Cape Town, between the postcard mountain and sea, has its own shadow-side lurking in its lap: a place of dislocation and uncertainty, dependence and desperation, destruction and survival, gangsters, pimps, pedophiles, hunger, hope and moments of happiness. This book therefore is an extraordinary and unsparing account of the coming of age on the street in Cape Town - a place of dislocation and uncertainty, desperation with glimpses of happiness.
This novel won the coveted Commonwealth Writer's Prize.
lessSix-year-old Gretl Schmidt is on a train bound for Auschwitz. Jakób Kowalski is planting a bomb on the tracks.
As World War II draws to a close, Jakób fights with the Polish resistance against the crushing forces of Germany and Russia. They intend to destroy a German troop transport, but Gretl’s unscheduled train reaches the bomb first.
Gretl is the only survivor. Though spared from the concentration camp, the orphaned German Jew finds herself lost in a country hostile to her people. When Jakób discovers her, guilt and fatherly...
“Brutal, haunting, redemptive and...beautiful.” – Jojo Moyes.
This extraordinary debut set in South Africa reveals legacies of abuse and redemption exploring the extraordinary strength of the human spirit - from the Boer War in 1901 to brutal camps for teenage boys now. There is always darkness but there is always light in it if we just look.
South Africa, 1901 - the height of the second Boer War. Sarah van der Watt and her six-year-old... more
Nelson Mandela is widely considered to be one of the most inspiring and iconic figures of our age. Now, after a lifetime of taking pen to paper to record thoughts and events, hardships and victories, he has bestowed his entire extant personal papers, which offer an unprecedented insight into his remarkable life.
A singular international publishing event, Conversations with Myself draws on Mandela's personal archive of never-before-seen materials to offer unique access to the private world of an incomparable world leader. Journals kept on the run...
Don't have time to read the top South Africa books of all time? Read Shortform summaries.
Shortform summaries help you learn 10x faster by:
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A week before Christmas, a young photographer discovers a plastic-wrapped corpse amidst the sand dunes north of Cape Town. The only thing found on the corpse is a dead iPhone, but it doesn’t take... more
Gauging the state of affairs, he talks to Africans, aid workers, missionaries, and tourists. What results is an insightful mediation on the history, politics, and beauty of Africa and its people.
In a new postscript, Theroux recounts the dramatic events of a return to... more
This extraordinary book tells Asad’s story. Tossed from one catastrophe to another, Asad’s journey covers countries and continents, from the cosmopolitan streets of inner-city Nairobi to the Ethiopian hinterland; and the... more
Ian GoldinIt’s the story of a kid, a Somali refugee. (Source)
A young English biographer is researching a book about the late South African writer John Coetzee, focusing on Coetzee in his thirties, at a time when he was living in a rundown cottage in the Cape Town suburbs with his widowed father - a time, the biographer is convinced, when Coetzee was finding himself as a writer. Never having... more
In January 1988 Martin Pistorius, aged twelve, fell inexplicably sick. First he lost his voice and stopped eating. Then he slept constantly and shunned human contact. Doctors were mystified. Within eighteen months he was mute and wheelchair-bound. Martin's parents were told an unknown degenerative disease left him with the mind of a baby and less than two years to live.
Martin was moved to care centers for severely disabled children. The stress and heartache shook his parents’... more
In 1720 the eminent man of letters Daniel Foe is approached by Susan Barton, lately a... more
Don't have time to read the top South Africa books of all time? Read Shortform summaries.
Shortform summaries help you learn 10x faster by:
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The world is also on the brink of war and South Africa elects to fight for the Allied cause against Germany. Six-year-old Tom Fitzsaxby finds himself in The Boys Farm, an orphanage in a remote town in the high mountains, where the Afrikaners side fiercely with Hitler's Germany.
Tom's English name proves sufficient for him to be ostracised, marking him as an outsider. And so begin some... more
As a visionary, statesman, and historian, and the most eloquent spokesman against Nazi Germany, Winston Churchill was one of the greatest figures of the twentieth century. In this autobiography, Churchill recalls his childhood, his schooling, his years as a war correspondent in South Africa during the Boer War, and his first forays into politics as a member of Parliament. My Early Life... more
Sonia MicuWhen it comes to biographies, I have cherished My Early Life by Winston Churchill for a long time, as the book that had it all for a profane reader like myself. It is beautifully written and Churchill’s writing style is highly entertaining. Plus, it gives you a glimpse into the early years of a flawed (yet brilliant) character. (Source)
But Willem Storm, though not a fighter, is both a thinker and a leader, a wise and compassionate man with a vision for a new community that survivors will... more
It is 1832 in South Africa, the year before slavery is abolished and the slaves are emancipated. Philida is the mother of four children by Francois Brink, the son of her master. When Francois's father orders him to marry a woman... more
Don't have time to read the top South Africa books of all time? Read Shortform summaries.
Shortform summaries help you learn 10x faster by:
- Being comprehensive: you learn the most important points in the book
- Cutting out the fluff: you focus your time on what's important to know
- Interactive exercises: apply the book's ideas to your own life with our educators' guidance.