Reading Matters (week 030) 22 July 2025

The Names (Phoenix) a debut novel by British author, Florence Knapp, has set the publishing world on fire.  It’s hardly hit bookshops and yet it’s to be translated into more than 20 languages.

Cora, a victim of severe domestic abuse, accompanied by her 9 year old daughter, goes to register her newborn son’s birth. Her brutal GP husband insists the babe takes his family’s name of Gordon. Cora does not – and nearly pays for it with her life. She gives the babe three names and for the next 35 years the book is divided into three sections headed by the child’s names with different outcomes.  It’s shocking, tender, amusing and I couldn’t put it down.

South Africa has the largest prison population in Africa, and in Behind Prison Walls (Tafelberg) Edwin Cameron, Rebecca Gore and Sohela Surajpal describe the horrendous conditions some prisoners endure.

The authors – Edwin Cameron is Inspecting Judge of Prisons – provide us with creative tools for urgent reform.

The full life of recently retired tennis great, Rafael Nadal, is intimately captured by Christopher Clarey in The Warrior Rafael Nadal and his Kingdom of Clay (John Murray/Jonathan Ball). I particularly enjoyed learning how and why Nadal developed his quirks, his tics.

Before his death in 2021, Wilbur Smith and his wife Niso, established their foundation to empower writers in adventure writing. In  Crossfire (Zaffere/Jonathan Ball) Smith and David Churchill return to the famous Courtney family series in a World War 2 thriller.

Reading Matters with Sue Grant-Marshall