WOLF, WOLF

EBEN VENTER

Scribe Publications £14.99 Fiction Set in Cape Town, Wolf, Wolf is a tense yet utterly rewarding novel about parental expectations, manipulation and conflicting definitions of what it means to be a man. How do gay men navigate the conflicts and disappointments that can arise when they don’t conform to being the type of man their fathers may have expected them to be? If they refuse to follow them into the family motor business or to continue the family bloodline? Mattie Duniker has returned home to nurse his father, blinded and weakened but not cowed by the cancer that is soon to take his life. Finally trying to step up to the plate Mattie is desperate for a chance to make his high-achieving father proud and to make things work with his boyfriend Jack, but his consuming online porn addition and lingering vulnerabilities could threaten both. Honest, astute, moving and brilliantly written.

HOW TO BE BOTH ALI SMITH

Penguin £8.99 Fiction The winner of the Baileys Prize, the Goldsmiths Prize and the Saltire Society Literary book of the year and runner-up for the Man Booker Prize, How to be Both is a uniquely special reading experience: inventive, playful and rewarding. On the one hand it is a novel about George, a contemporary teenage girl and her relationship with her political agitator mother who believes, with some satisfaction, that she is being monitored by the intelligence services. On the other hand it is story of the journeying soul or consciousness of her mother’s favourite Renaissance fresco artist, Francesco, who traverses place and time to become something of a guardian spirit, watching over George. A doubly rewarding book that recalibrates the process of meaning-making in beautifully accessible and exciting ways. Make some space for this book in your life when you read it, a good choice to take away with you on holiday.