Books like Juggling Truths

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.

This is the first in a long-running, action-packed science fiction series starring Miles Vorkosigan. He is brilliant, driven, ambitious, hyperactive, and neurotic. He also suffers from a chronic disability that makes him unfit for military service on his home planet. This is why he takes to the stars for a life of adventure and excitement under the pseudonym Miles Naismith, Admiral of the Dendarii Free Mercenaries.

This book is our introduction to Miles and shows the birth of the Naismith persona, and it is fabulous fun on every page. I devoured this series like potato chips.

Set in the past and based on real people, this is a gripping story about an unofficial relationship that crosses class divides.

The closeness between poet Elizabeth Barret and her maid, known by her surname, Wilson, is never properly acknowledged as a friendship. But that’s what it is, as Wilson gradually gets to know everything about her mistress, particularly her forbidden love for fellow poet Robert Browning, and Barret comes to increasingly rely on the dependable Wilson.

This book is a fabulous and creative imagining of these real lives, and of a deep friendship that is horribly betrayed when things go wrong.

I don’t know about you, but when I learned history in elementary school, we skipped straight from Ancient Greece and Rome to the Norman Conquest with the briefest of nods at Byzantium to acknowledge there was something in between. It was all very simple and straightforward—and completely left out the crumbling kingdoms left behind in the wake of the fall of Alexander the Great’s Empire.

I can still remember opening Gillian Bradshaw’s Horses of Heaven for the first time and thinking, “What’s Ferghana? Or Bactra?” Gillian Bradshaw wrote a number of books set in the wake of Alexander’s empire, but this one is the one that really stuck with me, told through the eyes of a girl picked to go as attendant to a Greek aristocrat from Bactra being married to King Mauakes of Ferghana (now Afghanistan).

Brandt cuts through the mystique that “writing can’t be taught” and encourages writers to discover the creative and rational aspects of their consciousness—an approach that excites me as a writer and a teacher.

Brandt’s approach is useful for beginning writers and also for writers going through a dry period. I recommend it to all my students.

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 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.