Books like Go tell the Sun — picked by fans

My home village of Serowe is a place I find fascinating for its history, its culture, its people and their peculiar mix of self-regard and obeisance. Bessie Head, a writer who has had the most influence on my work, was a great chronicler of Serowe throughout her oeuvre of brilliant novels and short stories. But it is this book, a mix of social and oral history, and interviews with the inhabitants of Serowe (of different races, cultures, and classes), that really has my heart.

Covering various historical eras and years spanning from 1875 to around 1963, the book’s subjects ran the gamut from the reign of Khama the Great to the origins of the green milking rubber hedge that is still ubiquitous in the village today. 

I love a classic tale of forbidden love, and this book explores love across class lines and across traditional Tswana values and modern values: a poor, uneducated boy who fled his family cattlepost and escaped to Gaborone, where he falls in love with the privately educated daughter of a retired diplomat.

What I love about this book, too, is how it provides a portrait of Gaborone at a certain time (the book was published in 1981) and the various people who made the city their home—upwardly mobile Batswana, political refugees from both Botswana and South Africa, diamond smugglers, officers from the colonial government and as the rural wide-eyed boy observes, “men wearing women’s attire and vice-versa…unbelievably high heels on both men and women.” 

I love this humorous coming-of-age story narrated by a naïve yet academically smart girl who is juggling the various conflicting truths of her life—what she is taught in school, what she learns at home, what she learns from her friends and her siblings, what she is told about how life is and what she observes for herself. How is a person to reconcile all these truths?

By becoming the Queen of England, which is what Monei, the narrator, says she wants to become when she grows up since the Queen is the only woman, as far as Monei can tell, who can make decisions. This is one of the funniest books I have ever read. Dow brilliantly captures the perplexed voice of a growing girl and the idiom of Botswana life around Independence.

“In Africa, you want more, I think.” So goes the first line of this sprawling and complex novel by the American writer Norman Rush. The version of me who has had to read countless broad and sweeping generalisations about my country and my continent was alert upon first reading this line. Suspicious and vigilant; ready to slam the book closed at any nefarious stereotypes. But I confess that the narrator’s voice—the funny, wry, intellectual and calculating voice of an American anthropology student obsessed with a celebrated American anthropologist attempting to build a utopian matriarchal society in the Kgalagadi desert—swept my defenses aside. 

The book is expansive and comic, and also serious about relationships between men and women, courtship, love, social movements and Southern African politics. A sequence early in the book in which the narrator is reduced to weeping at the beauty of the Victoria Falls and lamenting her lack… show more.

Do you like a good scare? Well, Stephen King is one kind of scary, but A Question of Power is something else altogether: a descent into a sunless valley writhing with monsters. We know that these monsters dwell in the mind of the main character, Elizabeth. But there’s no safety in knowing that, for we’re locked in with them. If we sometimes climb a tree and feel a fresh breeze on our faces, it’s with the knowledge that those tentacles can slither up and snatch us back into hell at a moment’s notice. And they do. 

I didn’t start with what many consider the most important facts of this novel: that Elizabeth is a mixed-race woman born in South Africa and exiled to Botswana. And those are vital facts. But Elizabeth is also one luminous, suffering soul. Watching her fight her way out of that dark valley is a terrifying… show more.

When I moved to Botswana, I wanted to learn more about the country, where I should live for more than 2 years. Somebody gave me books by Bessie Head and I learned so much by just reading these books. Maru was not the only book I’d read by Bessie Head, but it was one of the best books on Botswana.

It contains work by some of the most brilliant speculative fiction writers on the continent and also expands on the title, Africanfuturism, in its Introduction by Nnedi Okorafor. She also happens to have a story in the book. Another of the stories in it, by Motswana writer Tlotlo Tsamaase won the 2021 Nommo award for short story and a number of works in it, like Egoli by Tendai Huchu also made recommended reading lists and Year's Best anthologies. The anthology itself was a finalist in the Locus award for best anthology.

I was 30 years old - more than 30 years ago - with a high-flying career in the Information Technology industry when I first read this memorable non-fiction book about two young university students who went to study lions in the most remote parts of Botswana, Africa, with nothing much more than a backpack.

I remember chills running down my spine as I read of them sleeping under the stars just metres from wild lions, who had probably never seen a human being before. It was far from an easy life, but more than anything I wanted to know first-hand how that felt.

As a non-scientist it would be even more difficult for me – but after then visiting the African wilderness as a tourist I, too, decided that I wanted to be on the ground, fighting for the welfare of Africa’s endangered wildlife. 

Fiction is an excellent source of inspiration for leaders. This book is a prime example. The book is part of a series of books on the “No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency” in Botswana. The proprietor, Precious Ramotswe, uses a combination of wisdom, intelligence, and humor to solve crimes. Like leaders and entrepreneurs everywhere, she must handle a variety of challenges using limited resources. A special treat in reading these books is learning about daily life in Botswana. 

I love the combination of a historical mystery with a little-known location, but this book also charmed me with a spare but fluid writing style. Ceylon in the 1930s under British rule (today Ceylon is the independent nation of Sri Lanka) sets the first book in the addictive Inspector Shanti de Silva mystery series in a riveting yet mostly overlooked moment in history. Add a superbly written cast of characters and set them at odds against each other, and I’m hooked on the whole series.

De Silva is the head of a 3-person police force in the smallish city of Nuala where he must straddle the divide between the local population and his British bosses. Reports of a cruel tea plantation owner lead to a missing worker and the owner’s suspicious debt. A dubious business associate, a frazzled wife, and a chatty mynah bird all combine to add layers of… show more.