Books published by Modjaji Books

Christine Coates is a poet and writer from Cape Town who spends many hours walking on the mountain or besides the sea. She has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town. She has an interest in life-writing or memoir, and the recovery of personal history through public and private imagery. She translated her great-grandfather's Boer War journals and presented them in parallel text as a handmade, leather-bound book. She has undertaken the 800km pilgrimage across Spain, on the Camino de Compostela. Her stories and poems have been published in various literary journals: New Contrast, New Coin, Deep Water Literary Journal, scrutiny2, and the Cambridge Conference of Contemporary Poetry Review. Her poems were selected for the EU Sol Plaatje Poetry anthologies 2011 - 2014.

In this, her third collection of poetry, Phillippa Yaa de Villiers invokes images of past and present with hypnotic clarity, summoning the heart and heat of memory - painful and happy alike - with the distinct musicality and visceral punch she is known for. Some poems invite contemplation. Question and provoke. Others are elegiac, moments for reverence in a rich, diverse collection that both spans decades and pauses to revel in the intensity and beauty of a single moment. In liquid form that incorporates prose and poetry, de Villiers fearlessly confronts and disrupts, dipping into a wellspring of images that are euphoric and horrifying. At once prophetic and playful, ice cream headache in my bone is an exploration and celebration of language, a definitive collection that yields and responds, burns and soothes, all the while, calling to a longing for truth, and a tongue not tempered by oppression or pain.

I offer you my perspectives, my many mothers' teachings. I present both hopelessness and moments that excite, the taxi mgosi that makes me write.Johannesburg performance-poet Katleho Kano Shoro puts her stage presence into print with this metapoetic debut collection that captures the cadences of her fearless voice, her unassuming sense of humour, and her enthusiasm for an Afrocentric literary culture. Katleho reflects on creativity, on the writing, reading and performance of poetry, exploring the language that structures it, the forces that inspire it and the transformation that follows our experience of it. From there her words wander through personal relationships and politics, articulating ideas about masculinity, sexuality, blackness, colonialism and our connections to those we love. Crafted with both the spoken and written word in mind, Serurubele invites you not only to read poetry but to voice it, to taste the language as it flows from your tongue, to feel its rhythms and to hear its rhyme. Katleho has performed in Johannesburg, Cape Town, Grahamstown, Swaziland and London, and has been involved in myriad African literary initiatives. Recordings of her readings can be found online.

The title should have warned me. On reading the title poem, I realise any of the poems is a gateway into this passion with compassion, into a garden whose fragrances colour every sound lovers make when words have to cope. Make the lovers poets, see how each facet is etched, each jewel worked and polished. Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. , Hugh Hodge

Now Following You is a clever, chilling and compelling read, which deals skilfully with relevant issues , most notably, the power social media gives to stalkers and others who intend harm. Jamie Burchell is a digital native , social media comes as naturally to her as breathing. She Instagrams, tweets and Facebooks her every move. Then a stalker starts using social media to track her movements. As his behaviour escalates, so does her fear. But her blog has never been more popular. The fans can,t get enough of reading about her stalker. She is closer than ever to achieving her dream of becoming a writer. Should she take herself offline, or should she refuse to be intimidated? Soon the stalker starts threatening the people she cares about. But now it,s too late for Jamie to go offline , he,s already following her in real life.

This is modern Lusaka, Zambia, where the line between magic and religion is blurred, the arcane and the mundane muddle and nothing is what it seems. Luse is a sharp street child combing the gang-ridden city in a desperate search for Doctor Georgia Shapiro who she hopes can offer her a way back into her once-bright past. The doctor is trying to unravel the mystery of a friend,s sudden death while attending to the AIDS crisis laying waste to the country around her. Meanwhile The Blood Of Christ Church and its enigmatic leader Priestess Selena Clark gain popularity with their murky promises of salvation and violent clandestine rituals. A small silver box links them in ways they cannot foretell. It will force Luse and Georgia to question who they trust, who they are and for whom they fight. Tanvi Bush's Witch girl is a crime thriller that juggles the past and the present effortlessly, blending AIDS activism, witchcraft, religious extremism and romance to create a well-paced narrative. Luse is so feisty, charming and resourceful that you'll miss her after you finish the book.

'... the past was not yet done with here, I thought to myself; its problems drip-fed into the present, muddying it endlessly.'South Africa in a time of transition: a world of shifting boundaries and fluid identities, under siege from the relentless power of the past.In this evocative and finely crafted debut collection, De Villiers deftly probes the ambiguities of this changing country. From the older woman with her much younger lover, trapped in Johannesburg traffic during 'load shedding' - the new leveler - to the 'gap year' graduates seeking some kind of permanence abroad, each story manages to contain entire worlds. These are lives of unconscious longing; of individuals - often willingly - cast adrift from their history, animated here in poetic yet pared-down prose.

A dazzling collection from across the African continent and diaspora - here SHORT STORY DAY AFRICA has assembled the best nineteen stories from their 2013 competition. Food is at the centre of stories from authors emerging and established, blending the secular, the supernatural, the old and the new in a spectacular celebration of short fiction. Civil wars, evictions, vacations, feasts and romances - the stories we bring to our tables that bring us together and tear us apart.

Swimming with Cobras is a memoir about a journey to find a foothold in a foreign land grappling with its own identity, offering rare and important insight into a corner of South Africa's past. Rosemary Smithis life as an activist in the Eastern Cape began when she moved from England with her South African born husband in the mid-1960s. They made their home in Grahamstown where they raised four children. As a member of the Black Sash she participated in events spanning three decades in an intensely politicised and oppressed province. Through her involvement she made the transition to full integration in a country that at first struck her as alien and strange.

Love Interrupted is set partially in the university town of Grahamstown and partially in rural Limpopo. The stories in this collection have an intimate feel, like conversations eavesdropped on. We hear the voices of black South African women, many of whom have to endure their husbands, nyatsis (mistresses), their abuse or both. Some cope by turning to church, others by turning a blind eye and some, like the narrator of ,Vicious Cycle,, by seeking to understand the legacy of South Africa,s past and the effects of migrant labour on its men. Despite serious themes of patriarchy and racism, there is much humour and lightness in the stories, as in ,Bridal Shower,, in which the narrator encounters a male stripper for the first time, and in ,Toy Boy,, in which a woman befriends the gigolo next door. This is an engaging collection full or rich characters you won,t forget, from Lebo, whose dream is take over the business of her domestic worker,s mother,s boss, and uses a witchdoctor to punish her detractors to MmaPhuti, who spikes her famous ginger-beer with whiskey.

Journeys & arrivals in strange & magical places - a kaleidoscopic collection of stories by Africa's younger writers. Follow the Road is a collection of stories pushing against the grain of right vs wrong. It is an anthology of unique perspectives, ideas and dreams.

Life wasn't always this hard for fourteen-year-old Mvelo, who lives with her mother, Zola in the shacks on the margins of Mkhumbane township. There were good times when they lived with Sipho, Zola's lawyer boyfriend. But when the beautiful and mysterious Nonceba Hlathi arrives, Zola has to make a choice. She also has her pride. Now their social grants have been discontinued: the one for Mvelo being underage reared by a 31-year-old single mother, and the other for Zola because of her status. And there is also an elephant growing in their shack as the terrible thing that happened that night in the revival tent remains unspoken. In her second novel, Futhi Ntshingila once again introduces us to a cast of strong women who have little, but are determined to shape their own destinies.

Armed robbery is nothing new in South Africa. But when a pair of clever and squeaky-sounding criminals go on a looting spree that rocks several small towns in the Eastern Cape, Detective Inspector Thabisa Tswane from The Eagles, the Special Violent Crimes Unit is called to work the case. There,s only one problem, one of the most important witnesses in the case is her estranged grandfather, Chief Solenkosi, who ordered her violent expulsion from the village over ten years ago. In another world of lunches at the Michelangelo, private game lodges and platinum cards, the rich and slick Ollis Sando smoothes his way through cocktail parties and networking meetings. He is rumoured to be in line for the presidency in the upcoming elections. But he has a dirty past, something to hide and a hostage to hide it for him. In Now I See You Thabisa,s traditional and professional skills will be pushed to the limit. She will have to learn the difference between looking and seeing. And in stirring twists of fate, we,ll see that past and present blur, everything is interconnected and nothing can be assumed.

Hester's Book of Bread is an honest and delicious, down to earth book that tells of Hester van der Walt's passion for baking bread. Set in McGregor in the Klein Karoo where she bakes bread in a wood-fired oven, this book reflects Hester's intuitive feeling for the connections between the soul and food, particularly food that is prepared with care, according to traditional principles and methods. Hester's Book of Bread is infused with a fine sense of humour, helpful hints and mouth-watering recipes. It's a book as irresistible as the smell of bread fresh from the oven.

Turning her back on what is considered conventional, Makhosazana Xaba engages with her subject-matter on a revolutionary level in Running and Other Stories. She takes tradition , be that literary tradition, cultural tradition, gender tradition , and re-imagines it in a way that is liberating and innovative. Bracketed by Xaba,s revisitings of Can Themba,s influential short story, The Suit, the ten stories in this collection, while strongly independent, are in conversation with one another, resulting in a collection that can be devoured all at once or savoured slowly, story by story. By re-envisioning the ordinary and accepted, Xaba is creating a space in which women,s voices are given a rebirth.

A debut collection of poems from popular performance poet, Khadija Heeger. The collection is the first in a trilogy of poems that Heeger has worked on over many years. This collection is a combination of story-telling, resistance, re-naming, remembering. The language of the book is personal to the poet and reflects the wider community and society she is part of. She mixes languages, English and Afrikaans, and the language of the Cape called Kaaps.