Buy An Afrikaans Book Day!

Today is Buy An Afrikaans Book Day!

That's is not a very difficult thing for me to do.  I am actually exempt from this by my reading group on Facebook, as I ... "invest heavily" in the Afrikaans book industry ;-)

Here's my contribution for 2014:

Kamphoer by Francois Smith - an excellent book, based on The Boer Whore by Nico Moolman, in turn based on the amazing, horrific life of Susan Nell who survived a brutal rape and attack by two British officers in the Winburg concentration camp during the Anglo Boer War.   She survived and was nursed back to life in a hidden cave by a Sotho couple, who helped her escape the war to Cape Town, where she was taken in by the Koopmans-De Wet sisters.  From there she left for the Netherlands, was trained as psychotherapist and eventually psychiatrist.  She worked with victims of war in the Netherlands, UK and Java and eventually came face to face with both attackers. Chilling.

Seisoen van Lig en Donker by Alta Cloete - Alta started her writing in the Afrikaans romance genre and from there progressed to what in Afrikaans is classified as "relationship novels", or then, love stories with depth.  In this "Seasons"-series of 4 books, each deal with difficult and heart-wrenching issues such as anxiety, testicular cancer, miscarriage, farm murders, emigration and in this one's case depression and suicide.  Alta deals with this in a very sensitive manner and never takes you into a dark pit of despair.  I love her books and will buy the latest even without knowing what it is about.  

Both these books were great read (yes, I did my bit over the weekend already...who can wait for the 14th?)