Books by Jonny Steinberg

In the 1980s South Africa's urban townships exploded into insurrection led by youth and residents' organisations that collectively became known as the civics movement.

Serially betrayed by the people who promised to care for him, Asad lived his childhood at a sceptical remove from the adult world, living in a bewildering number of places, from the cosmopolitan streets of inner-city Nairobi to towns deep in the Ethiopian desert.

As national dramas played out on a small stage thousands of miles from home, Steinberg takes up a remarkable story of a horrific and heart-wrenching war, and of the quest to be human in a world losing its humanity.

At the end of a steep gravel road in one of the remotest corners of South Africa's Eastern Cape lies the village of Ithanga. It is Sizwe's deep ambivalence, rooted in his deep sense of the cultural divide, that becomes the key to understanding the dynamics that thread their way through a terrified community.