Chris Minnaar is a distinguished South African writer who feels he has lost whatever gift he had for writing. A chance encounter causes him to reflect upon his life and the many women he has known. This final act of writing is an attempt to bring order to an otherwise chaotic existence. Andre Brink's new novel is the history of a life set against the history of a nation, and the history of a transforming love. 311pp, UK. VINTAGE.

South African essayist, playwright and novelist, this book is a meditation on the ways ordinary people become politicised in repressive States. It is the story of Ben du Toit, whose investigations into his friends death causes him to become an outsider in his own community, in conflict with the apartheid system. 316pp. UK. VINTAGE.

New in paperback. Andre Brink grew up in the deep interior of South Africa, as his magistrate father moved from one dusty dorp to the next. With searing honesty he describes his conflicting experiences of growing up in a world where innocence was always surrounded by violence. From an early age he found in storytelling the means of reconciling the stark contrasts of is upbringing. While living in Paris in the sixties his discovery of a wider artistic life, allied to the exhilaration of the student uprising of 1968, confirmed in him the desire to become a writer. At the same time the tragedy of Sharpeville crystallised his growing political awareness and sparked the decision to return home and oppose the apartheid establishment with all his strength. This resulted in years of harassment by the South African secret police, in censorship, and in fractured relationships with many people close to him. His long love affair with music, art, the theatre, literature and sport illuminate this memoir as do relationships with remarkable women, among them the poet Ingrid Jonker, who have shared and shaped his life, and encounters with people like Ariel Dorfman, Anna Netrebko, Nadine Gordimer, Gunter Grass, Beyers Naude, Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela. B/w photos, 438pp, UK. VINTAGE.

When Kristien returns to South Africa to care for her ailing grandmother she finds a family and a country in a process of crisis and change. Gloss, 351pp, UK. VINTAGE.

In early 1749 a white woman and a black man are stranded in the South African wilderness. She is educated and totally helpless in the wilds, he is a runaway slave. Their poised, guarded selves begin to change as they face the long trek back to civilisation. 249pp, UK. VINTAGE.

Tells the story of Joseph Malan as he awaits execution for the murder of his white lover. 400pp, UK. VINTAGE

Now available in paperback. Early in the last century, a child escapes abuse in a Bremen orphanage only to face worse terrors in the colonial settlements of German South-West Africa. Gloss, 311p, UK. VINTAGE.

Now in paperback. In his early years, growing up on a Dutch farm in the deep interior of the southern African Cape, Cupido Cockroach became the greatest drinker, liar, fornicator and fighter of his region. Coming under the spell of a woman, the soap-boiler Anna, and particularly under the influence of the great Dr Johannes Theodorus van der Kemp of the London Missionary Society, Cupido is then made the first Khoi or 'Hottentot' missionary ordained at the Cape of Good Hope. The novel explores through the historical figure of Cupido Cockroach the origins of racial tension in the shadowlands between myth and history. 251pp, UK. VINTAGE.

Now in paperback. A meditation on ageing and on love, on loneliness and fulfilment, on guilt and innocence and loss. Set within the context of a rapidly changing South Africa. 311pp, UK. VINTAGE.

Winter in South Africa, a time of searing drought, angry stirrings in Soweto and the shadow of the Angolan conflict cast across the scorched bush. A wealthy Afrikaner plans a weekend away but his visit coincides with a time of personal crisis. 446 pp, UK. VINTAGE.