"An inner-life of Johannesburg that turns on the author's fascination with maps, boundaries, and transgressions"--

As a boy growing up in 1970s Johannesburg Mark Gevisser would play 'Dispatcher', a game that involved sitting in his father's parked car (or in the study) and sending imaginary couriers on routes across the city, mapped out from Holmden's Register of Johannesburg. As the imaginary fleet made its way across the troubled city and its tightly bound geographies, so too did the young dispatcher begin to figure out his own place in the world. At the centre of Lost and Found in Johannesburg is the account of a young boy who is obsessed with maps and books, and other boys. Mark Gevisser's account of growing up as the gay son of Jewish immigrants, in a society deeply affected - on a daily basis - by apartheid and its legacy, provides a uniquely layered understanding of place and history. It explores a young man's maturation into a fully engaged and self-aware citizen, first of his city, then of his country and the world beyond. This is a story of memory, identity and an intensely personal relationship with the City of Gold. It is also the story of a violent home invasion and its aftermath, and of a man's determination to reclaim his home town.

This book is full of love—of history and family. There are eight contributors from many cities and countries whose stories reflect the social and political upheavals of the previous century. There are snapshot portraits painted of people going back sixteen generations. The first is David Mitzkun, circa 1580, from Lithuania. The family tree was translated from Hebrew by a genealogist who created a descendants report with most of the names and dates of these sixteen generations. The youngest is a toddler in the newest generation. There are photos from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries as well as historical documents. Included in the book is the story of recovery of the tree drawn by the author’s great-grandfather and family members who found one another as result. This wonderful story has been televised as well as printed as a front page article of a New Jersey newspaper in 2014.

It was supposed to be easy. They would drop down to the surface, get Bit’s niece, and return to the Lenore. What could go wrong? The answer, everything. Nothing goes smoothly for the crew of the Lenore, or at least it hadn’t since Bit joined them. Now, Jack has a crew determined to find a lost child hiding somewhere in the known galaxy. The fact the child’s location is protected by a band of violent men makes the task just that much harder.

Tackling the goal to walk 25,000 miles —the equivalent of the circumference of the planet — one man shares life-changing insights through his personal travel vignettes. Formerly a thrill-seeking journalist, Geoff Dalglish begins his impressive expedition after undergoing a spiritual and ecological awakening at the Findhorn center in Scotland. His deliberate journey from Timbuktu to Antarctica to Hollywood unfolds in vivid and inspiring detail, revealing a wealth of unimaginable experiences while sharing a message about treading lightly on the Earth. From the horrors of bloody civil unrest and death-defying moments at the hands of armed guerilla soldiers to close encounters with the animal kingdom and finding healing balm within spiritual communities, this roller coaster of adventure chronicles a deeper quest for meaning that culminates in the joys of a life lived in simplicity and service.

David Mallory is a recently divorced former Headmaster who now consults with elite private schools when complex and potentially damaging scandals crop up. Lara Rios is a successful South Florida realtor and single Mum who lost her only child to cancer. David and Lara’s fledgling relationship is tested in the crucible when they investigate the accidental death of a student at a marquis school in Cape Town. Set against the colourful background of Palm Beach County and Southern Africa this seemingly straight forward case spirals into mayhem as David and Lara stumble upon murder, drugs and deception and face off against a cast of villains determined to silence them.

In Losing the Plot, well-known scholar and writer Leon de Kock offers a lively and wide-ranging analysis of postapartheid South African writing which, he contends, has morphed into a far more flexible and multifaceted entity than its predecessor. If postapartheid literature’s founding moment was the ‘transition’ to democracy, writing over the ensuing years has viewed the Mandelan project with increasing doubt. Instead, authors from all quarters are seen to be reporting, in different ways and from divergent points of view, on what is perceived to be a pathological public sphere in which the plot – the mapping and making of social betterment – appears to have been lost. The compulsion to detect forensically the actual causes of such loss of direction has resulted in the prominence of creative nonfiction. A significant adjunct in the rise of this is the new media, which sets up a ‘wounded’ space within which a ‘cult of commiseration’ compulsively and repeatedly plays out the facts of the day on people’s screens. This, De Kock argues, is reproduced in much postapartheid writing. And, although fictional forms persist in genres such as crime fiction, with their tendency to overplot, more serious fiction underplots, yielding to the imprint of real conditions to determine the narrative construction.