Reading Matters (week 28) July 7 2026

The cover of acclaimed author, and award winning translator, Michiel Heyns’ new book, The Wildest Beauty (Human & Rousseau) seems to be at odds with its title, for it depicts marching World War One soldiers, bayonets drawn, across a desolate landscape.

But the title is taken from World War One’s extraordinary poet, Wilfred Owen’s poem, Strange Meeting, an anti-war poem. Heyns’ novel concerns the Stellenbosch born and raised twins, Charlie and Danny, who enlist in the war ‘to end all wars’ as it became known. Danny feels estranged from his Greek-god-like twin whom he sets out to emulate at school and then follows into war to keep an eye on him. Heyns has won many awards for his writing and translating. I think this is one of his best books yet, intimate, heart-rending with sublime, delicate prose. A story to make you weep.

South Africa has just marked the 50th anniversary of the Soweto Students’ Uprising of 1976 and four books written of that time have recently hit bookshelves. Two are on Tsietsi Mashinini. Lynda Schuster, an American journalist who married a SA diplomat, has written, A Burning Hunger (Jacana) about Mashinini’s igniting of a revolution that he helped organise and led. It changed the struggle, South Africa and his family for ever.

Sam Mathe, well known SA author and journalist, has written Tsietsi Mashinini Elusive Hero of Soweto (Jonathan Ball) and provides a welcome chronology of the youth’s life and a full recounting of it including his eventual haven in Liberia where he married Miss Liberia, Welma Campbell, before dying in mysterious circumstances 11 years later.

In his fourth – and hefty – book, Soweto Uprising (Jacana) Julian Brown tells the story of the uprisings, expertly weaving together newspaper reports, eye-witness testimonies and state documents.

Finally, the BBC’s Lebo Diseko, in The House at 6001 (Macmillan) in Orlando East, Soweto, writes about the lives of her parents and her extended family who gathered, organised and resisted apartheid in their four-roomed home.

All four books are excellent recountings of a time in our history that will always be remembered.

Reading Matters with Sue Grant-Marshall