By BRUCE DENNILL & LISA WITEPSKI
The Age Of Bowie by Paul Morley
The Eighth Life by Nino Haratischvili
The Last Painting Of Sara de Vos by Dominic Smith
Wildlife Of Serengeti & Ngorongoro Conservation Area, edited by Heléne Booyens
Upstairs Downstairs: A Musical Memoir by Karina Marais
The Hidden Girl And Other Stories by Ken Liu
Biographies can often be impulse buys – if you see a new book about a personality you admire or respect and want to learn more about, there’s not much marketing needed to get you to pick it up. But The Age Of Bowie shows that a doing a bit of research can be a good thing too. Paul Morley has a good record as a music writer, but for a number of reasons, it was decided to write this book in just 10 weeks, without the sort of deep, detailed research that usually goes into such a tome. What results is deeply odd, often annoying and always indulgent meander through the impact David Bowie had on music specifically and popular culture in general. The majority of the text is weird stream of consciousness waffle with the focus almost always on Morley rather than, you know, the industry-altering icon on the cover. If you were hoping to learn more about David Bowie by reading this book, you’ll be disappointed. If you’re a long-time fan of the artist, you’ll probably be angry. Skip it. – BD
Get ready for a crash course on communism, disguised as a 100-year family saga.The Eighth Life starts with Anastasia, the Georgian-born daughter of a chocolate-factory owner, and traces the slow descent of her family from elegant soirees to famished siegesunder an increasingly frightening political regime. Against this backdrop, we see eight generations of daughters brutalised in different ways, from the extravagantly beautiful Christine to the disaffected Brilka – but it’s not as dreary and depressing as it sounds. Far from it – the tale is sumptuously beautiful, embroidered with elements of magical realism, wistfulness and nostalgia. It’s epic in every sense, with larger-than-life characters who will live on in your mind long after you close the book for the last time. At 934 pages, get ready to settle in for a long read – but it’s totally worth it. – LW
The richness of art – particularly as a reflection of life – is at the heart of The Last Painting Of Sara de Vos, which spans more than three centuries, with the constant being the titular artwork. All of the protagonists involved with the painting are flawed, but in different ways and to different degrees. Author Dominic Smith’s writing cleverly celebrates the layers in the artwork – scraped away, replaced, touched up and given meaning through the observation of the scene being painted and the expression of the emotion of the artist – and in the people who love it and interact with it. These include the painter, struggling under cultural oppression in the 17th Century; its morally supple owner; and a talented restorer who works with the painting 300 years after it was created. It’s fascinating, as a reader who enjoys any sort of art, to note how it impacts different people’s perspectives on the world and how it can become the pivot around which a life – or more than one – ends up revolving in some way. And with the drama of the overlapping situations created by Smith, this story adds up to something pleasingly fulfilling. – BD
The plains of the Serengeti and the Ngorongoro Crater are two of Africa’s blue-chip wildlife attractions, and their proximity to each other makes a visit to this northern part of Tanzania a no-brainer if resources allow. This guide to a good chunk of the species common to the region (covering all the bases would require a suitcase full of different books) eschews the block-and-label approach, with explanations of what the animals are and what to expect from them going into a little more informal detail than usual, and including photographs of how animals might behave differently here – think lions that regularly climb trees or use rock outcrops as vantage points from which to scope out prey. The language used is simple and clear, but also entertaining, and the high-quality photographs mean that identification of the animals in question via a quick reference to Wildlife Of Serengeti & Ngorongoro Conservation Area is easy and reliable. – BD
Karina Marais is an educator (she founded an educational NGO and uses creative means including board games and television to teach about finance and other topics). She brings that same inventiveness and a range of unconventional perspectives to her life outside of work, meaning that her memoir is already probably unlike what fans of mainstream biographies are expecting, and then adds further dimensions by including links for songs and videos she has recorded about her life, either introducing or embellishing various vignettes in that way. As if all of that was not enough, Marais, a non-executive director at the Forum Homini Boutique Hotel in Muldersdrift, also created a beautiful, dreamy restaurant in which to serve an 11-course meal featuring meals that speak to moments in or periods of her upbringing and adult life. All of these innovations make Upstairs Downstairs an interesting product regardless, but with nothing to actually read between all the ideas, it’d fall flat. Happily, Marais’ gentle, generous eccentricities mean there is much to provoke at least consideration of, if not immediate investment in, completely new ways of handling everything from romance to business via everyday living arrangements and ways of reacting to failure. – BD
American science fiction writer Ken Liu is good at weaving a number of themes into his short stories, but two stand out in particular: family and the singularity. A number of the tales in The Hidden Girl And Other Stories involve family members who exist only in the digital ether, which Liu makes feel all too real, maintaining the sense of connection and relationship between relatives while also underlining that characters made only of code can be manipulated in very different ways. Other aspects of the human condition – and the ways in which it can be affected by human actions – include journeys into wartime America and Japan, with racism and sexism simply part of the context in which quick, potent progress was prioritised over people. Elsewhere, the effects of climate change are a long way ahead of where they are now, and society has had to try to adapt. In another story, cultural artefacts turning up in different places and eras impact lives in unexpected ways. For all of the richness of Liu’s ideas and the way he challenges how his readers see today’s world and imagine tomorrow’s, he has a limited range tone-wise, meaning that at some point, it begins to feel the same (to some extent, at least) to read each new offering, which in turn means that the collection stutters towards the end, rather than building dynamically as a novel might. – BD