Books like Juggling Truths — 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 short stories for all the meaning, depth, substance, and sense of a full life they can reveal in a few short pages, and these short stories by Wame Molefhe do just that.

They are intimate and lovely, and in elegant prose, they reveal women in the thick of life, caught in treacherous circumstances, solitarily mourning extramarital lovers, mourning same-sex love they were not brave enough to pursue, mourning a best friend who might have had an affair with one’s husband thus exposing her to disease.

The characters' names recur in most of the stories, though each character is different, navigating a different set of circumstances. The effect is of intimacy, of encountering and re-encountering relatives or friends around the corner, at the supermarket, at a funeral, or a wedding. 

“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.

At first glance, this book of short stories is about Denver gentrification, but the volume is much more – a series of studies of how Native and Mexican women remember and revisit the “lost territory” of northern New Mexico and southern Colorado when they head to the Rocky Mountain metropolis.

I love that rather than look back East or out West when seeking home, the women of Fajardo-Anstine’s work look northward and southward, to the past and to the future. I was not at all surprised to learn that Fajardo-Anstine consulted with Prof. Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez for her work. Fonseca-Chávez’s Following the Manito Trail oral history project let me keep listening for similar voices.

I read this book in high school and absolutely loved the entire idea, of essentially a prisoner of war escape plan similar to The Great Escape, set in a science fiction universe against the scale and scope of a planet. 

I love how the author took a main character that had been so strong and tough through seven previous books and made her vulnerable, gave her new room to grow, and allowed some of her supporting cast to shine as well.

I always enjoy fish-out-of-water stories, and this book is one of my favorites. Suffragette and outspoken Kathryn are banished from Boston to a wild California gold town. Did she learn her lesson and hold her tongue? Absolutely not! This and the fact that she’s determined to change the town puts her at odds with her new community.

Not only did I love the main characters, Kathryn and Matthias, but I also enjoyed the secondary characters. They each had distinct and, in some cases, quirky personalities, which added depth to the story and made me smile. The story deals with serious themes, but the humor, charm, and delightful romance kept me anxiously turning the pages to find out how it all turned out.

This novel's compelling cover reeled in this reader straightaway and, indeed, delivers with a plot that captures the gothic folk horror genre in a tidy and well-written package.

As I read it, it felt like Harvest Home and The Wicker Man were seated on either shoulder. Overarching the story is also a "morality play" at work, expertly woven in. Bonus points for historical roots and an English village setting.

So original, so folky horror, so good and, simply put, a treat.

I love a tense, character-driven thriller, and this one was set in a remote town I’ve visited. 

I love that the book is set in 1963, a decade that had particular significance for Australian women, their roles, and the expectations placed upon them.

It’s not fast-moving, but the setting is an almost palpable character in its own right. I found it dark, rife with corruption, violence, oppressive heat, and both the best and the worst of what Australia has to offer.

Gavin Lambert adapted the works of D. H. Lawrence and Tennessee Williams for the films Sons and Lovers and The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone. He directed one interesting, low-budget, Paul Bowles-like movie, Another Sky. His prose work is insightful about the behind-the-scenes world of the movies.

The linked stories in this book memorably spotlight hangers-on and working-class people on the edges of entertainment. Also of interest is Inside Daisy Clover, his novel about a teen tomboy star which became an affected, bombastic, entertaining Natalie Wood movie.