Want to know what books Jonny Steinberg recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Jonny Steinberg's favorite book recommendations of all time.
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Challenging the stereotype that black people who lived under South African apartheid have no happy memories of the past, this examination into nostalgia carves out a path away from the archetypical musings. Even though apartheid itself had no virtue, the author, himself a young black man who spent his childhood under apartheid, insists that it was not a vast moral desert in the lives of those living in townships. In this deep meditation on the experiences of those who lived through apartheid, it points out that despite the poverty and crime, there was still art, literature, music, and morals... more Challenging the stereotype that black people who lived under South African apartheid have no happy memories of the past, this examination into nostalgia carves out a path away from the archetypical musings. Even though apartheid itself had no virtue, the author, himself a young black man who spent his childhood under apartheid, insists that it was not a vast moral desert in the lives of those living in townships. In this deep meditation on the experiences of those who lived through apartheid, it points out that despite the poverty and crime, there was still art, literature, music, and morals that, when combined, determined the shape of black life during that era of repression. less 
Jonny SteinbergThis is a new book, published the year before last. Dlamini asks this question: If you are black and you grew up in an apartheid ghetto, what if you still feel nostalgic for your childhood? What does that mean? He recounts his childhood and it’s an enormously nostalgic account. He loved his childhood. What does it mean? I grew up under apartheid but I feel deeply nostalgic about my childhood?... (Source)
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In a new novel by one of the premier writers of the ''new'' South Africa, an exile returns from America--where he fled during the apartheid regime--to find his newly democratic country in a shambles. more In a new novel by one of the premier writers of the ''new'' South Africa, an exile returns from America--where he fled during the apartheid regime--to find his newly democratic country in a shambles. less 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)
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Jonny SteinbergWell, the Karel Schoeman is a much older novel. It was written in the early 1980s in Afrikaans and it’s a historical novel, set in the 1870s before South Africa existed, in the [Orange] Free State. The central character is a Dutchman, a very refined, learned, late middle aged, bourgeois Dutchman, who comes to South Africa for the air because he has TB. The novel is the process of his dying, and... (Source)
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Marlene Van Niekerk, Michiel Heyns | 4.07
Set in apartheid South Africa, Agaat portrays the unique relationship between Milla, a 67-year-old white woman, and her black maidservant turned caretaker, Agaat. Through flashbacks and diary entries, the reader learns about Milla's past. Life for white farmers in 1950s South Africa was full of promise — young and newly married, Milla raised a son and created her own farm out of a swathe of Cape mountainside. Forty years later her family has fallen apart, the country she knew is on the brink of huge change, and all she has left are memories and her proud, contrary, yet affectionate... more Set in apartheid South Africa, Agaat portrays the unique relationship between Milla, a 67-year-old white woman, and her black maidservant turned caretaker, Agaat. Through flashbacks and diary entries, the reader learns about Milla's past. Life for white farmers in 1950s South Africa was full of promise — young and newly married, Milla raised a son and created her own farm out of a swathe of Cape mountainside. Forty years later her family has fallen apart, the country she knew is on the brink of huge change, and all she has left are memories and her proud, contrary, yet affectionate guardian. With haunting, lyrical prose, Marlene Van Niekerk creates a story of love and family loyalty. Winner of the South African Sunday Times Fiction Prize in 2007, Agaat was translated as The Way of the Women by Michiel Heyns, who received the Sol Plaatje Award for his translation. less 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)
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