The poems in ‘predicaments’ explore women’s responses to the constraints and consequences of choices they have made. Their responses are not much changed through the millennia of myth, history and into contemporary times. The poet reflects on significant moments in the lives of women such as Helen of Troy, Delilah and Joan of Arc, and the predicaments they are faced with in a man’s world.

Eighty-five-year-old Alma tracks a stallion through the wild bush. A young woman leaves her corporate job to start a wine farm as her marriage stales. A mother leaves her war-torn home to seek safety for herself and her daughter and a girl begs for survival.

In a series of ten mesmerising stories, Cranswick pulls aside the covers to let us in on the lives and inner lives of women thrown out of their comfort zone. With chilling clarity and a haunting lyricism, Cranswick slows down time, zooms in close, and refuses to look away.

Lynn Joffe

The Gospel According to Wanda. B. Lazarus is just what the world needs now. A fizzing, fulsome and fiercely funny heroine, and a novel charged with music, energy, bounce, juice and joy.’ – Stephen Fry

 

Skye is looking for normal. She grew up different and it rankles. Home isn’t normal; her mom isn’t normal. Her brother, beloved as he is, isn’t quite normal, either. Her marriage was kind of normal (Cam is a wealthy, handsome man who’s nice enough) and now it’s a dumpster fire. And look at South Africa—entirely NOT normal.

Fiona Snyckers

“We know what’s best for our children.”

Burnt out after years as a professional dancer, Ella Burchell moves to a small town on the KwaZulu Natal north coast hoping to rebuild her life. Things look up when she gets a job teaching dance to children at a for-profit private school.

But Ella hasn’t reckoned with the cabal of private-school mums who run the Pines Academy as their own personal fiefdom. Circling into cliques at the school gates every morning, the mums are a force to be reckoned with.

Christine Coates

The Summer We Didn’t Die is Christine Coates’ third poetry collection. It is an assured, tender collection that offers the reader a way to think about the mysteries at the heart of what it means to be human, in this place and time.