Stay home, travel far and wide

In times of pestilence we have always turned to stories to get us through. A handful of acclaimed writers share the books they plan to crack during lockdown

CHRISTA KULJIAN

A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki: “It’s like a message in a bottle, cast out into the ocean of time and space. Totally personal and real. The opposite of a blog. It’s an antiblog, because it’s meant for only one special person.” Sitting at a café in Tokyo, Naoko (Nao for short) writes about her great-grandmother Jiko, who Nao describes as “totally unique and special, like the last Galapagos tortoise”. Nao puts her completed pages inside a Hello Kitty lunch box, inside layered plastic freezer bags, and sets the package out to sea. “I don’t think old Jiko will mind because, being a Buddhist, she really understands impermanence and that everything changes and nothing lasts forever.” After the 2011 tsunami, the manuscript survives its ocean crossing and washes up on the shores of British Columbia, where Ruth, a novelist with writer’s block, is taking her morning walk. Ruth has recently moved to this remote island in the middle of Desolation Sound, living in a sort of self-quarantine. A Tale for the Time Being weaves Ruth’s middle-age reflections and Nao’s teenage search for meaning. Their musings on time, quantum physics, literary theory, social media, Buddhist philosophy and pop culture made me smile. Ruth and Nao’s shared story plays out in the wake of a global disaster, but offers humour, whimsy and wisdom. — Kuljian, author of Sanctuary and Darwin’s Hunch, is a research associate at WiSER (the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research).

MICHELLE CONSTANT

After reading a slew of novels and memoirs, including authors Shafinaaz Hassim and Rosanna Amaka, I moved on to nonfiction and am currently reading Bill Bryson’s The Body – A Guide for Occupants. Following his brilliant A Short History of Nearly Everything, his latest is keeping me transfixed. I thought it appropriate, given the lockdown and Covid-19 world that we have entered, to understand in layman’s terms exactly how my body functions. In particular I’ve been fascinated by Bryson’s description of a virus, which distils the danger and indiscriminate activity of the coronavirus. “Viruses are a little weird, not quite living but by no means dead,” he writes. Ostensibly he suggests that the virus is like a zombie — dead until it has access to living cells, at which point “they burst into animate existence, and reproduce furiously”. As I said — a zombie virus, dead until it is alive. It’s cold comfort, I know, but it makes for an informative and entertaining read. Bryson’s approach of using popular metaphors and humorous anecdotes to explain complex scientific and biological processes reminds us of the extraordinary gift and universe that is our body. It reminds us, too, of our humanity in an inhospitable time. — Constant is the presenter of the SAfm weekend breakfast shows in her playtime. In her daytime she is a consultant for the creative and nonprofit sectors, a cultural commentator and facilitator.

JONNY STEINBERG

One of the books I am reading is Erik Larson’s justpublished The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family and Defiance During the Blitz, an intensely personal portrait of leadership at a time of radical uncertainty; the parallels to now scarcely need pointing out. I have just finished Garth Greenwell’s new novel, Cleanness, which may well go down as one of the great modern literary explorations of sexual experience and its connection to love, violence and self-abnegation. It’s a stunningly good book, highly recommended. And I’m halfway through the historian Richard Reid’s Shallow Graves, his memoir of the Ethiopia-Eritrea war of 1998-2000. Reid was based in Eritrea during the war. It’s a hugely absorbing book and a reminder that many Africans have lived through upending times in living memory. — Steinberg is the author of the critically acclaimed Three-Letter Plague as well as Midlands and The Number, which both won the Sunday Times Alan Paton Award. His latest book is One Day in Bethlehem.

SALLY PARTRIDGE

In times of uncertainty, I tend to reach for something soothing and familiar, something immersive to occupy my mind for a few hours. When I was a young woman about to leave the nest, Harry Potter brought me months of comfort. I would read those wellthumbed paperbacks again and again, defiant of my growing anxiety. When the Covid-19 outbreak began to reach worrying levels, I knew right away which author I wanted to read — Hilary Mantel. Knowing I wouldn’t be able to get a copy of The Mirror and the Light, I reached for the next best thing, Wolf Hall, the first in the series, where we are introduced to the doomed Thomas Cromwell. For me, Mantel represents the best of humanity, an artist at the very height of her craft, who singlehandedly gave historical fiction rockstar status. Mantel’s prose is exact and exquisite, each word as considered as a surgeon’s steady hands. It gives me hope that we can reach this level of perfection. And that brings me more comfort than anything. So, while the world outside becomes increasingly inconceivable, you will find me on the couch, lost in the cold and beautiful halls of Hampton Court, witnessing the drama and intrigue of the Tudors. — Partridge is an award-winning novelist and shortstory writer. Her sixth young adult novel, Sea Star Summer, will be published this month.

PAMELA POWER

You’d think the lockdown would be the perfect time to read, especially for people like me who regard books as their greatest pleasure and escape. Crime fiction is my go-to genre, but since the pandemic exploded I’ve been struggling with it. I’m too haunted by images of people gasping for breath in ICUs around the world. Death is too close. But I also can’t NOT read, without books I’m lost, so I’ve been devouring “uplit” — fiction that uplifts. Some uplit books I’ve enjoyed: the Being series by Qarnita Loxton, The Authenticity Project by Clare Pooley, Saturdays at Noon by Rachel Marks and Grown Ups by Marian Keyes. If you like your uplit with a touch of suspense, I recommend Shadow Flicker by Melissa A Volker and The First Time series by Joanne Macgregor. The one psychological thriller I have been able to read and have thoroughly enjoyed is the newly released Two Months by Gail Schimmel. Gail’s book was due to be launched at Love Books in Johannesburg, but now that we are in lockdown, the launch was moved online. If you’re around (and let’s be honest, why wouldn’t you be?) please join us this Wednesday at 1pm on Zoom. You can sign in here: bit.ly/TwoMonthsPP. Stay safe everyone and #StaytheFhome! — Power is an author, screenwriter, and blogger at Go-See-Do.

MOHALE MASHIGO

The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives is a perfect lockdown read. Though the characters are not in lockdown, it certainly feels like it as they navigate life in a polygamous household. Baba Segi’s wives are the heart of this story, each with her own unique story. Lola Shoneyin does a spectacular job of exposing the interior lives of the women who are married to the uneducated, often boorish and sometimes entertaining Baba Segi. The first three wives have found interesting and shocking ways to survive marriage to their husband, but the fourth wife, Bolanle, is struggling to adjust. I won’t give too much away but this novel will have you gasping, giggling and crying. Another great lockdown book is Things We Lost in the Fire by Marianna Enríquez. This collection is pure escapism that will take you from your home straight into the gruesome and nightmarish lives of the characters in the book. I often watch horror movies to “get out of” my head, hence this selection. There must be more of us who want to read haunting and beautifully written stories that will stay with you long after lockdown. — Mashigo is the inaugural Philida Literary Award winner and a bestselling author whose debut novel, The Yearning, won the 2016 University of Johannesburg debut prize for South African writing in English. Her latest offering is Intruders, a collection of short stories.

JENNIFER PLATT

I am grabbing all my cookbooks off the shelves, dreaming that I will be making some quite elaborate dishes in the next few weeks. Maybe. I have staked some easy thrillers and will try to read the Hilary Mantel trio. For pure escapism, to reduce anxietyridden moments, I will read through all my Anne of Green Gables and live in the early 1900s on Prince Edward Island in Canada. As Anne says: “Dear old world, you are very lovely, and I am glad to be alive in you.” Oh, and the Harry Potter series again to keep my mind occupied on magical things and distracted so I don’t hear my noisy neighbours. — Platt is the Sunday Times Books Editor.

SARAH LOTZ

I wish I could offer up a list of happy escapist fiction, but the darker things get, the darker my reading has become, and like millions of others I’ve been revisiting my favourite apocalyptic narratives:

Stephen King’s The Stand; John Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up, Frank Owen’s South, Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven and Max Brooks’s dual pandemic handbooks, World War Z and The Zombie Survival Guide. There’s no clear answer as to why some of us flock to the fictional dark side in times of strife, especially as with each passing day, these novels tread a little too closely to what’s actually happening. Perhaps there’s something comforting in the fact that the world hasn’t (yet) become a dystopia run by psychotic cowboys (Trump excepted), or we haven’t yet gone full-on zombie apocalypse (except in your local supermarket). Perhaps in some way they act like crime fiction, a cathartic “safe” way to poke around in our darkest fears. Or perhaps they offer a twisted version of hope. Things may get very horrible indeed, but at least in the fictional world they end with some kind of satisfying resolution — unless there’s a sequel planned. — Lotz is a screenwriter and novelist whose books, The Three, Day Four, The White Road and Missing Person, are all

international bestsellers.

SIPHIWO MAHALA

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, which is triggered by the current outbreak. The Longest March by Fred Khumalo as a great historical novel. If You Keep Digging by Keletso Mopai — who is a writer after my own heart. Zulus of New York by Zakes Mda will keep you spellbound until the very last page, and The Man Who Founded the ANC by Bongani Ngqulunga is one of the very rare honest political biographies. — Mahala is a short-story writer, playwright and novelist whose books, African Delights and Red Apple Dreams, have been lauded.

MARK GEVISSER

Two books I love, and will be going back to in this period of enforced stillness and reflection, contain the world in their pages: Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, and Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate — the former as seen through the internal monologues of six English characters over a lifetime, the latter through the experiences of one Russian family under Nazism and Stalinism. In such different ways, and in such different contexts, both affirm the kind of humanism we all need right now, as only novels can. There’s also Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, which I’m halfway through: a must-read for anyone concerned about how the data of our very souls is being mined and monetised. But maybe that’s too heavy after all the intense reading of the pandemic and its consequences. In which case: Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light. Almost 900 pages — perfect timing! — Gevisser is best known for the biography Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred, which won the Sunday Times Alan Paton Prize in 2008, and his memoir, Lost and Found in Johannesburg.

‘Dear old world, you are very lovely, and I am glad to be alive in you’ — Anne in Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery, 1908