Reading Matters (week 028) 8 July 2025

Claire Robertson, author extraordinaire, has maintained her superlative writing record with her new book, The Immortalites (Penguin Random House). Set in the era of the 1820 Settlers and the Eastern Cape’s Frontier Wars, it tells the story of feisty Ellen Kent who sails from England as governess to a family, the father of which molests her.

Naturally it is her name, and not his, that is blackened and when the ship docks, Ellen is placed in the care of the captain who is travelling to Grahamstown. They join a caravan of settlers and the adventures en route make for exquisite reading. Robertson, whose debut novel, The Spiral House, won SA’s leading literary award, the Sunday Times Fiction Prize, has now written the tale of a search for belonging amid blood and dust.  A must-read.

Worried about AI’s impact on your life? Taking the Anxiety out of AI (Penguin) by Sameer Rawjee, founder of the Life Design Movement at Google, is an easy to read and highly informative guide to our futures.

Harlan Coben, one of the world’s bestselling authors has, in Nobody’s Fool (Penguin Random House) brought former detective Sami Kierce crashing back into our literary lives. As a backpacking youngster in Spain, he woke one day to find his girlfriend dead beside him and a blood covered knife in his hands.

He screamed – and ran.  Read the book to find out where he went.

Reading Matters with Sue Grant-Marshall