Art (and pun) by Tuesday Houston.

The last few years have been hard — brutally so. So late last year, it was a joy and delight to stumble into a new and unexpected booky project. An art gallery had opened literally across the road from where I live, and one of the first post-pandemic public events I ventured out for was an exhibition opening held there for the brilliant photographer Simon Sephton. Here I met Aimee Kruger, her brother Jared and his spice Bryony, and Tuesday Houston, all artists who run Noordhoek Art Point gallery. (You can meet them here.) Because I’d spent most of the years since March 2020 shackled to the ocean floor by Long Covid, I hadn’t met NOO PEEPLE since forever. Aimee mentioned that she wanted to use the gallery as a creative space for poetry readings and other book events for local authors, but didn’t know where to start. I felt a fizz in my dull, grey, stripped-down brain. It fizzed so much in the following days, I suggested a meeting. And next thing, the synergy was sparkling, our ideas meshed, I had found a space for running workshops on my doorstep, and had gone into business with a bunch of total strangers — who shared green principles, passion for our immediate environs, especially ocean conservation, and a commitment to supporting local businesses, community projects and artists.

But what does this have to do with cephalopods and cats? For decades, my email handle has been Hecate (in Greek myth, a mostly benign but slightly scary witch-goddess, who travels alone, materialising when people are at a crossroads, or in labour, birthing new ideas, projects, life changes). When social media came along, it was easy to become @heckitty. It helps that I am a card-carrying, fur-trailing Mad Cat Lady. And I love puns. So does Tuesday, who is also crazy about octopi and cats (octopusses?), but features mostly the former in her playful artwork. So when we were trying to find a name/brand and a logo for this offshoot of the gallery’s activities, we started using Hecate’s Salon as a joke catch-all description for the many book events (launches, signings, readings, workshops) I was dreaming up. It stuck. We eventually decided that Salon Hecate was slightly more pretentious but marginally less narcissistic than Hecate’s Salon, and I roughed out a little cartoon of a pleased cat reclining on a chaise-longue, 18th-century salon-style. (Fascinating factoid about salons historically: not only were they places to discuss subversive literary, artistic and philosophical ideas, but they often featured women who were otherwise shut out of public life and debate.)

Tuesday took one look and said the cat should be reclining on a tentacle. Our more sensible partners pointed out in vain that this was a splendid in-joke that would be lost on outsiders, but too late — by then Tuesday had done the painting you see here, and I was SMITTEN. The kitty is based on my caramel torty Meg and Tuesday’s two gingers. A chaise-longue is for relaxing, tentacles reach out, the sea is a strong theme throughout the gallery, I’m a sucker for bad puns and wordplay — for me, this picture and the name Salon Hecate resonate (especially given my fondness for my Hedgewitch hat).

And so they designed this glorious image for our big-splash launch on 9 December last year.

It’s all still so brand-new, I am pinching myself, but here’s the broad plan. We’ll be having poetry readings and book events the first Monday of each month — our focus this year will be on poetry and short story collections that fell into the Marinaras Trench of Covid and never got launched as a result. On the second Thursday of each month, we’ll have a writing or editing workshop that will usually chime with the gallery’s focus theme for that month. Workshops will have a fee attached, but entrance to all the other events will be free. So far, the events will be in-person — we all have virtual fatigue, plus loadshedding makes organising online participation tricky. The idea is to create events and opportunities that are refreshing and restorative, that offer good company and conversation, that celebrate what’s good in our local community.

So if you’re in Cape Town, please sign up for the gallery’s newsletter so we can keep you in the loop. Just a taster of what’s coming in the next month or two: tomorrow, the year kicks off with our first poetry launch — come and hear Nondwe Mpuma and Christine Coates read from collections that got upstaged by the pandemic, but are now having their moment in the sun (and waves).* We’re hoping to hold writing workshops on 26 January (“Recipes and memories” — the idea being to help you collate your family’s favourite recipes and the stories they hold) and 31 January (“Writing for pleasure” — finding the freedom to write for pure FUN). (These to be confirmed: final details will be on the gallery website very soon.) On 6 February, we’re putting together an evening of readings “Horsing Around” (yep, Tuesday again) that will bow in the direction of the big equestrian events in Noordhoek that month, and celebrate the month of love, so save the date. On 16 February, we’ll host a workshop “Everything you ever wanted to know about writing sex scenes and were afraid to ask” (I shall wear my erotica writing hat for that one), we’ll be having a reading by some very special poets on 6 March, and on 14 March, we launch Keith Gottschalk’s Cosmonauts (another poetry collection drowned by Covid).

Here are a few pics of the Salon opening, and the gallery and its people. Come visit us yourself: there’s a great coffee-shop right next door, and there’s always someone to chat to.

* Jared is responsible for the palette-cleanser pun. I have found My People.

Tuesday, with one of her designs: whales, tails, tentacles and bathing beauties.

The launch of Salon Hecate — happy people, beautiful space, no one at sea, and pea-green boat not required.

You’ll find us behind the famous Smarties wall on Noordhoek Main Road.

Artwork by Roulé Le Roux of www.unfold.co.za

Content warning: frank discussion of what it's like to die of Covid, or experience Long Covid; likely to distress anyone who’s lost a loved one to Covid.

If we’re lucky, if we’re in the right age group, if we’re privileged enough to have access to the internet and a smartphone, and a nearby vaccine site, we can be protected against this viral monster rampaging through our communities. And yet every day I talk to people in despair because people they love — parents and other family members — are resisting the jab. In such cases, we’re encouraged to be encouraging, not judgmental. To ask people why they’re hesitant, to understand why they’re anxious, and why their anxiety is taking this particular form. It doesn’t help to grind our teeth when they tell us about “this video my friend sent me on WhatsApp”.

But I am here to tell you why you shouldn’t delay one more minute. I have the second most compelling reason why you should get vaccinated if you have so much as a sniff of a chance. My sister (healthy, no comorbidities) almost died of Covid during the second wave, spending a staggering 65 days in ICU, undergoing a dozen medical procedures as her magnificent care team struggled to save her life: induced coma, ventilation, bronchoscopy, tracheotomy, full blood transfusion, and more. In one photograph taken after she was starting to recover, I counted nine tubes going into her body, hooking her up to six machines. She had an oxygen mask clamped to her face for so long, it broke her nose. I could (and will) go on.

But the most compelling reason is that thousands of families have lost loved ones, in the most appalling circumstances: unable to hold their hands, unable to say goodbye, unable to huddle together with friends for comfort. And so much of that anguish and loss could have been spared if we had had vaccines available before the first and second waves hit, and the vulnerable could have been protected. Imagine how those devastated families must feel, seeing people who have access to a vaccine refusing something that could have saved the lives of the parents and spouses and children they loved, who will never be coming home again.

So I am going to be honest, and not fudge around with euphemisms, as we tend to do when talking about death and dread disease. Let me lay out what it is you’re risking, by describing (from first-hand experience) what Covid might do to you. And your family.

First, let’s talk about the likelihood of your dying or being seriously disabled by Covid. Imagine a small cocktail party, with twenty of your most beloved friends and family present. Now imagine all of you get Covid. Know this: one of you WILL die, and another two will be horribly disabled or impaired, possibly for life. Try to pick those people, see their faces. That’s the absolute, inescapable reality of Covid without vaccines. In fact, you can do this exercise with the ten people you love most in the world; if infected, one will die, two will be disabled. In the twenty-person scenario, I'm working with the most conservative, first-wave figures, in which 5% of Covid-infected died, and 10% got long Covid. According to the latest stats for the delta variant, the South African recovery rate is under 90% (in other words, over 10% are dying — source: NCID); and in the UK, where they're tracking Long Covid, they’re starting to suspect that as many as 20% develop this awful condition (source: Imperial College London study).

This is what happens when someone dies (or, in our case, almost dies) of Covid. One bleak blessing, explained to me by a doctor, is that at least it’s not a painful death: you will most likely be in a coma, actual or induced, at the time. But know this: it is a terrifying and unbearably lonely death. Survivors who remember being ventilated speak of the overwhelming panic, first of not being able to breathe, and then of their terror as grim doctors approach with mask and machine. And if you get the delta variant, which often spells uncontrollable diarrhoea, you’ll likely die in a puddle of your own mess.

The worst, though, is the loneliness. As you fight to suck air into your lungs, waiting for a ventilator to become available, you’ll be desperate for a loving, familiar face. There will be none. There is no place lonelier than a Covid ICU ward. People around you will be dying, and there will be no one to hold your hand, or speak words of reassurance and comfort. The nurses will try to do what they can, but they will be rushed off their feet, and numb with trauma.

Now imagine the whole thing from the perspective of your family. Once you’re delirious or sedated, you’re as lost to them as if you were on the dark side of the moon. Awful truths we learned the hard way: the first rule of Covid ward is, don’t phone the Covid ward. (They won’t answer anyway.) Regulations mean that once someone is in ICU, ONLY their doctor may speak to ONLY the next-of-kin. Your next-of-kin will get one rushed two-minute call from an exhausted doctor every 24 hours (if you’re lucky — on six separate days when my sister’s condition was critical, we didn’t get a call at all, which caused my elderly parents such anguish, I still can’t bear to recall it).

But there’s worse to come: did you know that before they can switch off the ventilator, the hospital needs the family’s consent? So there’s one thing more awful than not getting a call: the calls to warn you that this decision is imminent. You cannot know the terror and dread with which your loved ones will clutch their phones, the sick horror they’ll feel every time it chirps or buzzes — the chimes of WhatsApp messages from numbers I haven’t yet muted still trigger panic attacks. Also, have you thought about how one gathers together to let go of someone dying of a highly infectious and potentially deadly disease? Yup, family Zoom call or similar. If you’re lucky, a nurse will hold up a phone so your immediate family can see you for the last time. IMAGINE THE HORROR. Do not, I beg you, choose to risk putting your family through this mill.

There’s another matter that you may not have considered: what all this will cost. My sister’s hospital bills amounted to the price of a small house. She was lucky enough to have Rolls-Royce health insurance: if you don’t, you risk beggaring yourself, or your estate, or your family. Even if you have medical aid, the costs are so staggering that the co-payments alone could wipe you out financially.

But let’s say you get Covid, and you don’t die. So it’s just like flu, right? WRONG. You stand a ten to twenty per cent chance of developing a condition known as post-acute Covid syndrome, or Long Covid (I call it LoCo). I have this. I got my first Covid symptoms on 23 March 2020. Over 15 months later, I am still sick, with no end in sight. There are dismaying reports coming out of the UK and the US (where there are millions of LoCo sufferers) suggesting that the condition may be chronic.

Let me tell you what long Covid will do to your life. It will blow a crater in your path to the future. It will end your career, or put it on hold indefinitely. It will eviscerate you financially. It will put almost intolerable strain on your family and relationships. It makes it very difficult to care for your small children. You may end up dependent on family, both to pay the bills and care for you; if you value your independence, you can wave it goodbye. You can expect to live with, in no particular order, an endless cycle of chest pains, breathlessness, persistent cough, racing heart, insomnia, night sweats, headaches, hair loss (my eyelashes fell out over a year ago, and show no signs of growing back), extreme joint and muscle pain (so bad it will wake you at night), huge hard cold sores, cuts and scratches that won't heal, nausea, diarrhoea, itching, rashes, double and blurred vision, sicca syndrome, loss of taste and smell, extreme clumsiness (constant tripping and falling, dropping things and breaking them), and more. The recurring or chronic pain leads to depression and other mental health problems. In the US, Long Covid is responsible for an uptick in opioid addiction, as sufferers beg their doctors for pain relief.

Maybe the worst is the fog and the flattening exhaustion, with many days when you won’t be able to get out of bed. The weakness that can render you helpless. All the small pleasures of your life, whatever they may be — bridge or chess games, walking and gardening, watching series or reading, your favourite foods or tipple — are stripped away by your inability to find the energy for even the smallest tasks. Some LoCo sufferers are seriously impaired: they need wheelchairs or walkers, they experience loss of vision and hearing, strokes, heart conditions, kidney failure. In the UK, so far one in twelve LoCo patients is dying of these complications. There is NO treatment or cure for any of this yet (I am managed by a brilliant infectious diseases specialist, one of South Africa’s early Covid experts, I research the condition continually, and I. Have. Tried. Everything. Nothing has worked so far.) Especially if you’re elderly, is this how you want to spend the rest of your life?

You’re welcome to refuse the vaccine or talk about “personal choice” if you are a hermit, with no family or friends who care about you, can isolate yourself so that you never go near another human being again, and are willing to sign a waiver refusing medical treatment should you become so ill as to need hospitalisation. But I’m assuming you have people who love you. And telling them any of the following is not going to reassure them.

1) “But my reiki practitioner/yoga teacher/etc says I have a strong immune system.” This bug is the ultimate form of Russian roulette. Frail and elderly folk are bouncing through Covid; healthy young marathon runners are dying on ventilators. You have NO idea how your system will respond, and you don’t want to find out the hard way.
2) “But I’m protected by the ivermectin I’m taking.” Doctors tell me that much of the ivermectin people are buying on the streets takes the form of sugar pills or saline drops. Your local dealer is laughing like a hyena all the way to the bank. But you might be the lucky ones; if you’re taking the real thing long-term without a medical history to check your liver function (the drug is hepatotoxic to some), watch out for possible hepatitis, cirrhosis or a liver transplant down the line.
3) “I could die in a car accident.” Maybe, but you can’t get vaccinated against car accidents.
4) “If my time is up, it’s up.” Yes, but you can CHOOSE not to die this awful, isolated way, which will heap extra trauma onto your already devastated family — and land them with a whopping great bill to boot. 5) “We need to find out more — I’d like to hear all sides.” Vaccines have been a near-miraculous health intervention for 150 years: they are why you did not die of smallpox or polio or tetanus as a child. This is not the time to start “digging deeper” (code for watching too many YouTube videos featuring the word “sheeple”). Do you really want to hear the side of folk like the American doctor who told a hearing that she’d heard of vaccinated people becoming magnetised, with spoons and forks clinging to their bodies? (I hope they took away her licence to practice medicine.)
6) “I’m worried about side-effects.” Like ALL meds, vaccines have side-effects, and these will affect people differently. A tiny handful of people can’t have them because of allergies, which is why you need to present your medical history, and remain on site for 20 mins in the extremely rare likelihood of anaphylactic reaction. I was extremely unwell after being vaccinated (this is apparently to be expected in LoCo patients); but being able to reassure my 80-something parents that they no longer had to worry about me dying on a ventilator was worth several days of feeling even ghastlier than usual.

Vaccines are not a perfect tool, and researchers are scrambling to keep up as the bug develops new and even deadlier variants, but they’re the best weapon we have at the moment. In the US, 90% of Covid hospital admissions and 98% of Covid deaths are now in the unvaccinated population. This was confirmed today by the NHS report that while vaccinated citizens in the UK are still falling ill from the highly infectious delta variant, few of them need hospitalisation, and almost none are dying. Yes, you need to do your part: wear a mask, sanitise, follow social distancing rules, take Vit C, D and zinc (so says my specialist). But in the final analysis, your best shot at NOT DYING is the jab.

There are breadwinners all over this country who wake in dread every morning, wondering if today is the day the virus will strike, robbing them and their families of life and health and joy. They don’t qualify for the vaccine yet, and who knows when our meagre supplies will run out. These folk are dying (some of them will literally die) for the opportunity you have presented to you on a plate. Please do not risk the fate of the much-loved chef Lesego Semenya, who died ONE DAY before he was eligible to register, something likely to torment his loved ones.

BTW, I’ve been reading up on vaccine supply to SA: it’s clear that we’re soon going to be experiencing supply chain and distribution problems and shortages of vaccines courtesy of government bungling, so we can’t even take our current limited access to vaccines for granted. (Update 15 July: the vaccination programme has now been disrupted by (un)civil chaos, so even more NB to get yours while you can.)

So if you qualify, please PLEASE go get jabbed. TODAY. Do not risk what we went through. What I’m going through. None of the words above can convey anything like the full horror of our experience. I wouldn’t wish a day, even an hour of it, on my worst enemy.

Artwork update: Roulé le Roux, a stranger to me, supports the message here so strongly that she offered to create an original work for this post, for free. Her arresting image captures with eerie accuracy what it is to live tethered with dread and hope to one’s phone. I am so grateful to her, and urge you to visit the Unfold website.

Dear government,

ALL books are educational. ALL of them, every single one.

We hoped that you would allow the safe delivery of physical books under this new stage of lockdown. But I wasn't too optimistic: it's been clear from past official responses to pleas to drop VAT on books, and your position on the new copyright bill, that you consider books either to be worthy but dull necessities (as in school textbooks) or idle frivolities, luxuries we can easily do without.

Never in my lifetime has South Africa had a government that really understood the purpose of books, what they make possible. Although perhaps the apartheid government recognised the inherent power of books by banning so many of them.

Of course you read: position papers, research briefings, media reports. But increasingly I wonder if you ever read for enlightenment or pleasure. And if you know what books are actually for. Because if you did, you would understand that there is no distinction between "educational" and "other" books. And also no way to make that distinction.

You might feel that some kinds of books are not educational. But all books contain role models, even graphic novels (what you might call comic books) and thrillers. Almost all fiction deals with the struggle between good and evil, order and disorder. This is why reading is so comforting: stories set the world to rights. Obstacles are overcome. As internationally acclaimed poet and performer Lebo Mashile has pointed out, it is artists and writers who do the work of processing of black pain and trauma in this country — in our stories, our plays, our poems, our memoirs, our explorations of history.

And right now, the entire world is traumatised and grieving. We are going to need every resource possible to survive what lies ahead, and those resources are not just material. Fretful children at home, teens wondering how to research a school project, a stressed single parent needing to spend a few minutes after the children have gone to sleep escaping into a world of happily-ever-after, scholars, academics and the scientists we’re relying on to save us, elderly people who are not tech-savvy and who are in anguish at the prospect of months of self-isolation: we all need books.

Of course ebooks are important, and will become more so. But they require hardware, software, data or modems — and all of that translates into cash, along with a simultaneous supply of electricity (let's not go there, shall we?). I don't need to tell you that the majority of South Africans cannot afford tablets, laptops, e-readers.

Reading physical books is going to be critical in the months ahead. Unlike an electronic copy, a single book can serve an entire family. As author Thando Mgqolozana once famously said, books in his street were read by so many that the pages became tissue-thin from handling.

Here’s a story about a “non-educational” book. In Grade 11 History, my niece studied Black Consciousness. Tutoring her, I dug up my treasured and stained copy of Steve Biko's I Write What I Like. It arrived in my life over 30 years ago, when an activist friend arrived at my door with an armful of books that needed hiding (she and her partner were picked up and slung into detention at 5 the next morning). That stash also included books by Hugh Lewin, Breyten Breytenbach, Mongane Wally Serote and others: all banned. I read them hungrily, afraid that the Security Branch police would come and take them away. Those books were profoundly educational; they still make up part of my mental furniture.

My friend returned for her books one day, but she let me keep Biko's. And twenty-five years later, I met Biko's son, Hlumelo, and he signed my battered copy. My niece's eyes widened as they fell on his handwriting: the people, the history, immediately came alive for her. And so Biko’s book became deeply “educational” for a second generation of my family.

To move onto another book, almost at random, this morning a friend posted a review of the latest Avbob poetry collection, I Wish I'd Said…. This is a collection, in all the official languages of South Africa, sponsored by Avbob to increase resources available to bereaved South Africans. It features poems on the subjects of death, loss and hope, and as the reviewer writes: “It achieves precisely the goal it sets out to: it consoles, enlightens, nourishes the grieving soul.”

Every single one of us is going to lose someone we love, someone we know, to this horrible virus — a few of us already have. Some of us are never going to be able to say goodbye to our parents, to visit them one last time. And yes, loss is part of all our lives, but right now it is cruelly exacerbated by the necessary restrictions on funerals. Author Khaya Dlanga's account of how, a few weeks ago, he agonised over whether to sit next to his mother and rub her back as they buried her son and his brother, would wring tears from a stone. At a time of social distancing, he had to choose between comforting her, or possibly putting her life at risk. We are all going to be faced with these agonies, these impossible choices. And to have a book like this one, which offers empathy, provides words for our losses and grief, in the languages we speak in the intimacy of our homes — it could be a life-raft. But are you going to consider poetry "educational"?

Books, especially as physical objects, comfort even those who cannot read. Book Dash, an NGO that makes books in every SA language free to children, has published over a hundred titles, some of which are "wordless" — the stories are told in images only. This means that a grandparent who cannot read can still cuddle a whimpering child on their lap, pointing at pictures on the pages, both of them absorbed in following and telling a story they make uniquely their own. Book Dash is eager to deliver free books to South African children under lockdown, and to partner with feeding schemes to do so. But do you consider their books educational?

A clue here: ALL books for children are educational. Every single one of them. At the VERY least, lift the ban on delivery of children's and YA books.

As I often point out, the private prison industry in the US calculates how many inmates to build for in 15 years time by counting the number of ten and eleven year-old boys who cannot read for meaning. Now stop and think of our prisons, bulging with young people. Longitudinal studies have shown (they really have, Google will update you) that the earlier children start interacting with physical books, once they become young adults, the lower their rates of petty crime, early pregnancy, illicit drug use, incarceration, mental illness, and many other social challenges. Likewise, their chances of completing education, getting employment, starting families later also improve with exposure to books — exposure to television and online content does not have nearly as dramatic an effect. More startling research shows that it's not textbooks that make this difference (within four years, the average learner has lost almost all memory of facts learnt from “educational books”): but fiction.

This is because the mental leap necessary to read fiction and memoir, anything that involves entering a world created by another, teaches empathy. EMPATHY. The one thing we will need in massive amounts, for others and ourselves, if we are to survive the frightening new world in which we live. What’s more, this empathy is not didactically taught: it’s created by the actual neurological and imaginative process of reading.

Fiction teaches us patience. It comforts and soothes us. It enables us not only to imagine, but to inhabit other worlds, countries, societies, minds. It teaches us to travel in time and space and history, a lesson I learned from reading fairy tales and legends to children with severe developmental disabilities many moons ago. In a fictional world, not only do we learn to stand in the shoes of others, the playing fields where we do these imaginative exercises are level. Those children who hung on every word of the stories I read of knights and dragons and spells and talking animals could all access those worlds equally, regardless of whether they were rich or poor, whether they needed a wheelchair to get around or not. That’s not a luxury.

And it seems that you have forgotten our history. That one of the greatest fights by political prisoners, especially those serving life sentences, was for the right to get books and study materials. That when people were detained, and were allowed only religious reading material, even the atheists called for copies of the Bible, so that they would have something to read. That almost every person subjected to that cruel manifestation of apartheid, a banning order that restricted them to their own homes and the company of their immediate families only (sound familiar?), ended up with a vast library: the one solace in their time of trial.

Finally, even if you persist in clinging to the idea that books are a luxury for the wine-swilling book-club classes, surely takeaway meals are a luxury too? I’m delighted that exhausted frontline workers are now able to call for a pizza. But then for the love of your fellow citizens, allow the delivery of books. There isn’t even space to point out that if this isn’t permitted soon, the trade publishing industry in this country will die: regardless of the sterling work it does in providing us with truth, beauty, comfort, escape.

I’ve been meaning to write this post for nearly a month, on books perfect for that weird zone between Christmas and New Year, when time stretches and hazes and the brain is equally fritzy. For those lucky enough to be on holiday over this period, here are some easy and entertaining reads. You may have noticed something about these Festive Booky Posts: with one exception so far (and there were SA connections in that case), all have featured local books. This is (as I’ve said before) not because South African writing and writers need any special pleading; but our publishers can’t even begin to compete with the marketing departments of big international outfits. Yet we have every kind of reading material to tickle your fancy, including in the commercial genres: so whether it’s historical fiction or romance or thrillers or police procedurals, we’ve got it all. To make this even more fun, while today’s post features beach and/or sofa reads by local authors and set in localities many will recognise, they’re also all by women authors. Then I decided to make a rule that all those featured had to have written two or more books in the chosen genre, because of that feeling of reading the last word of a really entertaining book and looking around hopefully for more of the same. So here you go.

First, 2019 saw the near simultaneous publication, by newly established Karavan Press, of Melissa Volker’s first two novels — Shadow Flicker and A Fractured Land. What a breath of fresh air: billed as eco-romances, they’re also pretty gripping thrillers. Shadow Flicker deals with wind turbines and A Fractured Land with fracking in the Karoo, but neither book is remotely preachy, nor do they bog down in technical details. The green issues are used simply to get the plots rolling downhill, gently at first, then at increasing speed. Brilliant concept, if you think about it: the tension is set up right from the get-go, and is highly relatable. As are the characters — human, wrestling with demons we all recognise (debt, anxiety, family strife) — and a few of them turn out to be psycho murderers, too. Let’s not forget the romance, either: good quotient of hunky (but flawed) heroes and love triangles. I haven’t seen anything like Volker’s novels elsewhere, and highly recommend them: she’s interesting about everything, whether it’s live music or surfing. Never a dull moment. The books also have beautiful covers, designed by Megan Ross.

Then, for Marian Keyes and Jojo Moyes fans, on to Qarnita Loxton’s Being series: Being Kari, Being Lily and the recently released Being Shelley. I’ve only read the first one, but I thoroughly enjoyed it, and it had what I especially like in this category of fiction: fun, even fluff, but with a good, chewy centre with some crunch to it. Being Kari deals with a Muslim woman who marries “out” and moves to a conventional and mostly white suburb on Cape Town’s coast — and then has to go home again because of a death in the family. The navigating of two worlds, the issues of identity and belonging give this highly readable romance some heft. Kari/Karima is part of a tight group of friends responsible for much of the novel’s fun (all the sex and shopping jokes), and the next two in the series deal with others in this group, so I’m really looking forward to meeting the gang again. Yet they’re all stand-alone novels. Oh, and the covers are gorgeous and suitably festive.

For real, proper grown-up “chick-lit” (what I prefer to call “domestic drama”), that will suck you in like a vacuum-cleaner, read Gail Schimmel’s The Park and The Accident. Be warned; although they’re not thrillers, both books had me reading until 2am. Once again, super-entertaining. Both involve moral and legal dilemmas that will have you wondering “What if that was me?” I also like Schimmel’s dry sense of humour and lean writing — not a word wasted.

Hawa, gorgeous as always. Picture found on the Liberian Observer site, no photographer credited.

Although Liberian H. J. Golakai isn’t strictly speaking a South African writer, she lived here long enough for me to claim her (I hope she doesn’t mind), and her crime novels featuring reporter Vee Johnson, The Lazarus Effect and The Score, are set in Cape Town and Oudtshoorn. An immunologist, she’s a superb writer, with my absolute favourite her non-fiction essay “Fugee”, but for holiday reading, I recommend her novels, recently reissued by Cassava Republic Press. She doesn’t shy away from the tough stuff, but falls firmly into the “let me escape for three hours” category of reads.

So everything I’ve recommended so far has some crunch; the issues are thought-provoking, even if the treatments are effortlessly smooth and highly digestible. But your brain is utterly fried, you never want to see your rellies again, and there will be murder if you have to resurrect that turkey carcass, then you need pure candyfloss. In which case, try Fiona Snyckers’s two e-book series: the H mysteries, featuring PI Eulalie Park, and the Cat’s Paw Cosy Mystery series (I just checked and the first in both is free!)

Snyckers is a local writer, but in this case, the two series are set on imaginary islands; one a semi-tropical one in the Indian Ocean; the other off the coast of Cornwall. The H books have a bit more weight (I loved the kick-ass, slightly fey heroine and her unusual love interest, as well as the location and all the FOOD), but the Cat’s Paw books feature kittens, so I am completely biased in their favour, and probably shouldn’t be trusted. But if, like me, you like a well-oiled plot and go all squiffy-eyed at cats in starring roles, get out your e-readers NOW. Six in each series, so that should get you safely past New Year.

The Cat’s Paw series does exist in print as well, but in this case, e-versions are probably the way to go.

Festive quotient for all of the above: off the charts. Romance, interesting settings, humour, and some interesting ideas on how to bump off one’s relatives. Or understand them better.

More Twelve Booky Days posts for the holidays. I tell this story every year at this time, as it encompasses nearly all my favourite things: books, writers, the kindness of strangers, the sort of miraculous coincidence that would never be plausible in fiction. Also a cracking good Christmas story.

A few years ago, I spent six weeks in a tiny village on Penobscot Bay in Maine, where the local library became a favourite haunt (it was everything a good library should be). Here I read my way steadily through Lee Child’s Jack Reacher ouvre. Not my usual fare, but I was keeping my grieving friend Karina company. After the death of her husband, she had turned to Lee Child’s thrillers for escape. But her first Christmas as a widow was approaching, and she was all out of Reacher books to read. Meanwhile, a Cambridge academic and surfer, Andy Martin, was about to publish a book on Lee Child’s writing process. I forgive Twitter everything because it somehow enabled Andy and Karina to connect online. They didn’t know each other; but when I offered to buy her a copy of his book (not available in South Africa), he said he was in the States, and he’d send a signed copy for me to mule back to her.

Here’s the amazing story of how, at the little Post Office in Castine, Maine, where the employees acted as my own personal Santa storage depot, not one, but TWO gift books showed up: dedicated to Karina and me and signed not only by the author, but by Lee Child himself. And all kinds of things followed from that; Andy came out to the Open Book festival in Cape Town the following year, and we got to Skype chat with Lee himself.

Time keeps passing, Lee keeps writing (so does Andy, and so does his wife Heather Martin, currently working on Lee’s biography), and we check in on each other online. We have each other’s books by now (I particularly enjoyed Andy’s two books on surfing), and I feel a warm glow every time I see Reacher Said Nothing: Lee Child and the Making of Make Me on my shelf.

This year, Andy published another book, this time not on Lee’s writing process, but his readers. Called With Child, it’s an account of how a book is marketed and received (required reading for everyone who thinks writing a book means lolling about on couches or in coffee-shops with a laptop), and also a colourful parade of real characters, with stories that are bizarre, hilarious and poignant. And there’s a chapter on Karina. It’s the most poignant of them all, even more so than the one about the man with terminal cancer and weeks to live, whose dying wish was to read the latest Jack Reacher novel, not yet released — and who had an advance copy sent to him in hospital.

I read the chapter on Karina first, but then I went back and read the entire book, utterly absorbed — it’s darkly funny, philosophy pops up at the most unexpected moments, and as a study of the work, responsibilities of and restrictions on a blockbuster writer, it’s fascinating. Highly recommended, and not just because I have a tiny walk-on part in it (as @Heckitty).

And then I read the Acknowledgements, with no small degree of disbelief. As my niece says, I can now retire: I have billing, in alphabetical order, with Tom Cruise. Oh, and Stephen King. And Karin Slaughter. See for yourself. *bows, accepts flowers, thanks family, manager, high-school English teacher, etcetera*

On the day before Christmas, I found this — the only Reacher book Karina doesn’t have — in a local charity shop. Yet another improbable, delightful coincidence.