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Gerald Cubitt’s latest book.
with Text & Design by benni hotz
Come on a journey with Africa’s finest nature photographer to lands of time-honoured
cultural traditions and unspoilt natural wilderness. Here is the ‘real Africa ‘– astonishing
in its diversity of wildlife, breathtaking in its natural beauty, and unforgettable in its
bursting floral kingdom.

'The Stranger's Child' by Alan Hollinghurst. Published by Picador in trade paperback at R190. pp564.

Hollinghurst won the Man Booker Prize for 'The Line of Beauty' and his new novel has been longlisted for this year's prize. The story centres around the brief life of a sub-Rupert Brook poet. Cecil Valance arrives one weekend in 1913 at the Sawle family residence, 'Two Acres' and affects the lives of all those around him, including his best friend George Sawle and his sixteen-year-old sister Daphne, to whom he dedicates a poem, which subsequently becomes a touchstone for a generation. The events of that weekend, slight enough and including the usual sexual hanky-panky, become the prism through which an entire century of English life is viewed, by the characters themselves as they age and by later biographers and critics of the poet, whose shifting views and agendas mirror the changes in taste, class and social etiquette over time.  The writing is, as ever, very fine and the hot-house atmosphere amongst this group of Bloomsburyesque characters is observantly explored. Hollinghurst never strays far from his chosen upper and upper-middle-class English milieu, which some South African readers may find a little precious but very few others write about it quite as well.

Steve Davies
The Bay Bookshop

December Newsletter (PDF)