Reading Matters (week 034) 19 Aug 2025

Parenting! The best, the worst, the most fulfilling or most destructive time of your life – whether you are child or parent. That’s what I reflected on as I listened to the voices at the launch of Parenting Psychoanalysed: Letters to a Parent by Dr Andy Cohen (Routledge / Jonathan Ball).

Cohen’s deeply affecting book is of course not as binary as I’ve described here. The letters she received from psychoanalysts across the world about parenthood, some of which she edited and included in this book, will make you think, question, yearn, laugh and cry. Informative, touching, insightful, we’ll all benefit from this book.

Abdulrazak Gurnah who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2021, and has authored 40 books, has in his latest, Theft (Bloomsbury / Jonathan Ball) moved home to Zanzibar. It’s a postcolonial tale of three coming-of-age children, one of whom is an uneducated servant boy. Told in Gurnah’s inimitable style.

The braai season is almost upon us and the famous Jan Braai has now turned his prowess to kids, in Jan Braai Junior in the Kitchen (Penguin).

Simple but stunning recipes are complemented with splendid pictures.

Reading Matters with Sue Grant-Marshall