Reading Matters (week 27) June 30 2026

Max du Preez, investigative journalist who founded Vrye Weekblad, the first anti-apartheid newspaper published in Afrikaans which fearlessly exposed secret government death squads in the late 1980s, has in his riveting new book, The End of Normal (Jonathan Ball) summed up SA’s dark and bright moments since 1976.

He was there on the first day of the Soweto student uprising in June 1976 and saw the first marching children being killed by police. It was the end of ‘my normal’ he writes, and continues to detail SA’s history over the past 50 years.

He does so in expressly readable style, covering topics like the relationship between Afrikaners and white English-speaking SA’s; the ‘Border’ war; the Truth and Reconciliation Commission; Nelson Mandela and FW de Klerk. Max brings fresh insight to many a contentious issue and challenges news media, ‘if you don’t want to be an activist for truth, justice and free speech then go sell cars, or property or become a politician’

This book will, I hope, be in every senior school classroom soon.

If you’ve read Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe, about the hugely addictive oxycontin drug crisis and the Sackler family’s appalling role in it, then London Falling is a dead cert for you. It’s a totally true story about a teenager, Zac Brettler, who fell to his death from a luxurious apartment on the banks of the river Thames. It is situated opposite the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6 and his fall was caught on camera.

Was he pushed or did he jump? Zac had been living a total fantasy, in which he was the son of a Russian oligarch worth billions. He, totally unbeknownst to his family, gets caught up in London’s vicious gangster underworld. Patrick, in his inimitable authorial style, captures the grief of the Brettler family, questions the police force’s handling of the case and reveals the Russian oligarchs’ modus operandi. I could not put it down.

Reading Matters with Sue Grant-Marshall