Lauren Beukes’ Bridge among new books to put a spring in your step

Bridge is the latest novel by Lauren Beukes, the SA author famous for her unique storytelling and ability to blend elements of different genres, her complex characters, and ability to tackle societal themes through her writing.

Adrift and unsure of her identity, Bridge dropped out of a business degree programme and works in a bookstore. While at the house of her mother, who has recently died, she and her nonbinary friend Dom, a Puerto Rican artist, find a mysterious object in her mother’s freezer, “a lumpen yarn‑y cocoon. It’s greyish yellow, bulbous and striated, like a spindle wrapped in rotting elastic bands,” — the dreamworm — “saggy, malformed. Familiar. Foreboding,” the avocado-sized object evokes memories Bridge has long repressed. And so begins her quest to understand her past and identity.

In a scene that’s splendidly revolting, Bridge puts a piece of the dreamworm in her mouth and discovers that it’s a portal to infinite parallel worlds and alternative selves. She becomes convinced her mom is lost somewhere out there and begins a quest through time and space. But the dreamworm is more dangerous than she can possibly imagine.

In an interview, Beukes describes Bridge as a reverse Persephone, the goddess who was abducted by Hades and taken to the underworld to be his queen. Distraught, her mother Demeter, the goddess of agriculture and fertility, caused a great famine and winter to descend on the Earth.

“in this instance, Persephone is the one searching for her mother, and seeking to understand her mother’s obsession with a mythical object that allowed for escape to the multiverse, a concept about which we know frighteningly little.” In our current world, Beukes adds, society is obsessed with the idea of other realities where our lives might have worked out differently.

“I write books for the kind of people who would appreciate them,” Beukes says. “They are difficult, and I don’t treat my audience as if they need to have their hands held. I throw them into the deep end, and they have to figure out stuff for themselves.”

In all its gory glory, Bridge explores a central existential question: how do we become the people we are? If you’re a fan of spectacularly inventive speculative fiction, this gripping story will keep you turning the page late into the night.

War novel meets murder mystery

From another South African, acclaimed novelist Craig Higginson — known for exploring complex human emotions, relationships, and the dynamics of society through his stark prose — comes The Ghost of Sam Webster.

As he is packing up his mother’s home in Johannesburg, writer Daniel Hawthorne hears the disturbing news that Sam Webster, the 17-year-old daughter of his friend and renowned historian Bruce Webster, has gone missing. When Sam’s body is spotted briefly along the bursting banks of the Buffalo River, Daniel resolves to investigate her disappearance.

He begins by travelling to the Websters’ luxury lodge in the heart of Zululand, where he claims to be researching a new novel about a disgraced ancestor, the lepidopterist lieutenant Charles Hawthorne, who fought in the Battle of iSandlwana in 1879.

But nothing is as it seems. Long hidden secrets about both Hawthorne and the Webster family are revealed and the lines between love and hate, betrayal and loyalty, and cowardice and courage become blurred. The Ghost of Sam Webster is at once a tale of war, a murder mystery, a romance and a reaffirmation of humanity’s resilience in the face of formidable trials.

A tale of literary London and slavery in Jamaica

Based on real historical events, Zadie Smith’s latest novel The Fraud is inspired by an obscure English novelist and a trial involving a missing heir. The story centres on Eliza Touchet, cousin and housekeeper to novelist William Ainsworth.

By 1868, Ainsworth’s literary success has been overshadowed by his friend Charles Dickens. As Ainsworth continues to churn out dreadful novels, he prepares to marry his maid Sarah Wells — the wedding arrangements are delegated to Eliza. Sarah becomes fixated on a man claiming to be Sir Roger Tichborne, a missing heir presumed dead in a shipwreck. While many consider the Claimant, as he is called, to be a butcher from Wapping, Sarah staunchly defends him from upper-class contempt.

Eliza becomes involved in the trial due to her connection with Andrew Bogle, who was enslaved by the Tichborne family in Jamaica. The narrative shifts between the trial’s progression and Eliza’s recollections of her complex past.

An escape across colonial America’s wilderness

As with her previous work Matrix (2021), Lauren Groff's latest offering The Vaster Wilds, is a captivating exploration of America’s past propelled by her skill with language and rhythm. A young servant girl escapes from a colonial settlement in the wilderness with nothing but her survival instincts and few meagre possessions.

Navigating a land plagued by famine and disease, she seeks the settlements of Frenchmen in Canada, guided by the memory of a map she once saw. The heart of the story lies in survival — from hunger, bodily harm, infection — and the girl’s quest for freedom. The publisher describes The Vaster Wilds as “a work of raw and prophetic power that tells the story of America in miniature, through one girl at a hinge point in history, to ask how — and if — we can adapt quickly enough to save ourselves”.