A magical coming-of-age tale in rural Zimbabwe Ah, you’ve arrived. Sit down, please, and make yourself comfortable. There may not be much dinner tonight – Father is still out of work; Mother can’t do anything with those stunted maize plants in the stony ground – but at least you are here, in Gushure Village, home to unsurpassed raconteurs and the Guramatunhu family, who know that telling stories staves off hunger. Surprise awaits at every turn: thoughts and conversations bloom into poems, political speeches and songs. You will find instructions for cooking a hare, for how to defend yourself when a dead snake is your enemy’s chosen weapon, how to speak in war tongues, how to compose a fist and aim it at a tree trunk, how to eliminate animal terrorism in a time of rabies, how to rehearse the body-viewing of a good-looking corpse, how to rock under flying okapis with The Double Shuffle, and how to practise your lovemaking technique on a woman drawn in the sand. At a time when cooked ants constitute a feast, the future nevertheless holds abundant prospects for the boy who devours words. But there is an unexpected fork in the road for this book louse, and plenty of wondrous twists and shocking turns. Hilarious, poetic and poignant, Robert Muponde’s vibrant coming-of-age story of Ronald Guramatunhu brings to life rural Zimbabwe from the Second Chimurenga to independence. There are malevolent mermaids, eccentric shamans, outrageous relatives, fearsome teachers, and men who transform into hippos in a tale that captures all the magic of childhood.

Exploring lives lived, written and narrated in and from the Global South, the far South and the ultimate South, Antarctica, this book asks how life writing from southerly compass points impact both how we understand and read life narratives, and ultimately how we perceive our planet. Southern geographies, histories and lives have often been overlooked and defined by northern perspectives; Life Writing and the Southern Hemisphere redresses this North/South alignment in its critical examination of life stories, memoirs, biographies and autobiographies from the southern hemisphere, providing a countervailing and alternative perspective that will unsettle, challenge and enrich the imaginative norms that inform life writing studies. From Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia in South America, through southern Africa, to Australia and New Zealand and as far down as Antarctica, this collection brings together writers and scholars in the oceanic humanities, postcolonial, Global South and polar studies, and presents works on human, animal and plant life captured in words, music, performance, visual arts and photography. Interdisciplinary and vast in its comparative range, Life Writing and the Southern Hemisphere convenes a diversity of perspectives and positions that demonstrate that the south has rich internal knowledge sources of its own, allowing us to better conceptualize the planet 'from below'.

Mintirho ya Vulavula: Arts, National Identities and Democracy examines the role of arts and culture in development, and specifically its value in consolidating our nascent democracy and in facilitating the transformation of South African society. Contributors to this edited volume interrogate the role of arts, culture and heritage from a transdisciplinary perspective, enriched by the cross-generational perspectives offered by young and older artists, cultural practitioners, activists and scholars. Authors also offer some policy recommendations on how the contribution of arts and culture to social cohesion and nation-building can be enhanced.

A page-turning novel that is also an exploration of the great philosophical concepts of Western thought, Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World has fired the imagination of readers all over the world, with more than twenty million copies in print. One day fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find in her mailbox two notes, with one question on each: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" From that irresistible beginning, Sophie becomes obsessed with questions that take her far beyond what she knows of her Norwegian village. Through those letters, she enrolls in a kind of correspondence course, covering Socrates to Sartre, with a mysterious philosopher, while receiving letters addressed to another girl. Who is Hilde? And why does her mail keep turning up? To unravel this riddle, Sophie must use the philosophy she is learning—but the truth turns out to be far more complicated than she could have imagined.

When Paul and Dominique are sent to boarding schools, their idyllic childhood on a South African farm is over. Their parents' leftist politics has made life impossible in the local town school. Angry schoolboy Paul is a promising poet, his sister his confidante. But his literary awakening turns into a descent. He flees the oppression of South Africa, only to meet his death in London. Dominique Botha's poignant debut is an elegy to a rural existence and to her brother - both now forever lost. The novel is based on true events.

David Fleming, Hart Mackenzie's right-hand man, seeks refuge with his vicar friend in Shropshire, only to find that the vicar's beautiful niece, Sophie, is seeking refuge as well. Tongues are wagging all over London about Sophie, and she finds that the only gentleman sympathetic to her plight is the reprobate David. David and Sophie match wits as they help her uncle dig up the countryside searching for a villa from Roman Britain, and David decides to use his conniving ways to fix all Sophie's problems. It’s the least he can do for the woman who has woken him out of the stupor in which he’s been living.

Unsinkable is the definitive memoir by film legend and Hollywood icon Debbie Reynolds. In Unsinkable, the late great actress, comedienne, singer, and dancer Debbie Reynolds shares the highs and lows of her life as an actress during Hollywood’s Golden Age, anecdotes about her lifelong friendship with Elizabeth Taylor, her experiences as the foremost collector of Hollywood memorabilia, and intimate details of her marriages and family life with her children, Carrie and Todd Fisher. A story of heartbreak, hope, and survival, “America’s Sweetheart” Debbie Reynolds picks up where she left off in her first memoir, Debbie: My Life, and is illustrated with previously unpublished photos from Reynolds’s personal collection. Debbie Reynolds died on December 28, 2016, at the age of 84, just one day after the death of her daughter, actress and author Carrie Fisher.