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Pocket Change Collective

In Beyond the Gender Binary, poet, artist, and LGBTQIA+ rights advocate Alok Vaid-Menon deconstructs, demystifies, and reimagines the gender binary. Alok Vaid-Menon challenges the world to see gender not in black and white, but in full color. Taking from their own experiences as a gender-nonconforming artist, they show us that gender is a malleable and creative form of expression. The only limit is your imagination.

Concrete Kids is an exploration of love and loss, melody and bloodshed. Musician, playwright, and educator Amyra León takes us on a poetic journey through her childhood in Harlem, as she navigates the intricacies of foster care, mourning, self-love, and resilience. In her signature free-verse style, she invites us all to dream with abandon–and to recognize the privilege it is to dream at all.

In Imaginary Borders environmental activist and hip-hop artist Xiuhtezcatl Martinez uses his art and his activism to show that climate change is a human issue that can’t be ignored. He visualizes a future that allows us to direct our anger, fear, and passion toward creating change. Because, at the end of the day, we all have a part to play.

In The New Queer Conscience, LGBTQIA+ activist Adam Eli argues the urgent need for queer responsibility — that queers anywhere are responsible for queers everywhere. Eli calls on his Jewish faith to underline how kindness and support within the queer community can lead to a stronger global consciousness. More importantly, he reassures us that we’re not alone.

In Taking on the Plastic Crisis youth activist Hannah Testa shares with readers how she led a grassroots political campaign to successfully pass state legislation limiting single-use plastics and how she influenced global businesses to adopt more sustainable practices.

In This is What I Know About Art arts writer, curator, and activist Kimberly Drew reminds us that the art world has space not just for the elite, but for everyone. co-editor of Black Futures Kimberly Drew shows us that art and protest are inextricably linked. Drawing on her personal experience through art toward activism, she challenges us to create space for the change that we want to see in the world.

Surfacing: On Being Black and Feminist in South Africa

Surfacing: On Being Black and Feminist in South Africa is the first collection dedicated to contemporary Black South African feminist perspectives. Leading feminist theorist, Desiree Lewis, and poet and feminist scholar, Gabeba Baderoon, have curated contributions by some of the finest writers and thought leaders into an essential resource. Radical polemic sits side by side with personal essays, and critical theory coexists with rich and stirring life histories. The collection demonstrates a dazzling range of feminist voices from established scholars and authors to emerging thinkers, activists and creative practitioners.

The writers within these pages use creative expression, photography and poetry in eclectic, interdisciplinary ways to unearth and interrogate representations of blackness, sexuality, girlhood, history, divinity, and other themes. Surfacing asks: what do the African feminist traditions that exist outside the canon look and feel like? What complex cultural logics are at work outside the centers of power? How do spirituality and feminism influence each other? What are the histories and experiences of queer Africans? What imaginative forms can feminist activism take?

Surfacing is indispensable to anyone interested in feminism from Africa, which its contributors show in vivid and challenging conversation with the rest of the world. It will appeal to a diverse audience of students, activists, critical thinkers, academics and artists.

Featuring contributions by Barbara Boswell, Panashe Chigumadzi, Pumla Dineo Gqola, Zethu Matebeni, Sisonke Msimang, and many more.

Nation on the Couch

Nation on the Couch: Inside South Africa’s Mind explores life in our beloved country through the lens of psychoanalysis. There are many political and social commentaries on post-apartheid South Africa but few – if any – psychological ones.

By focusing on the idea of a “political unconscious”, Long argues that there is much to be learnt from excavating the inner life of South Africans, to illuminate the external problems that engulf us from all sides.

The book reframes our troubling social issues as manifestations of darker emotional impulses – specifically shame, envy and impasse. It will challenge readers to rethink the way we see ourselves, and help us understand why we do what we do to our fellow South Africans.

Nation on the Couch tackles the disturbing question which we normally treat as rhetorical: what is wrong with us South Africans, as a nation? With clinical wisdom, Wahbie Long shows us a way out of the morass. ~ Mark Solms, research chair of the International Psychoanalytic Association and author of The Hidden Spring.

By The Fading Light

The Year is 1960, and in the vibrant community of Salt River, fear is everywhere. A boy, Amin Gabriels, has disappeared. His Friends, Ainey, Cassius and Haroun, on the cusp of adolescence, worry that they might be next to go missing.

Things are not as they seem in Ashraf Kagee’s startling and profound evocation of Salt River in 1960, as he traces the lives of Amin’s three friends. The boys, mischievous and fun-loving, play a prank which sets in motion a series of events that places their lives at risk. In this gripping story, they discover an awful truth about their community. Set in the aftermath of the Sharpeville Massacre, the lives of four young boys weave together in a story of lost innocence, the uncertainty of kinship ties, and the unbending nature of fate.

Get Excited for The Gilded Ones

Namina Forna, author of epic YA fantasy series The Gilded Ones, discusses the inspiration behind the book.

The start of a bold and immersive West African-inspired, feminist fantasy series for fans of Children of Blood and Bone and Black Panther. In this NYT bestselling book, girls are outcasts by blood and warriors by choice.

Sixteen-year-old Deka lives in Otera, a deeply patriarchal ancient kingdom, where a woman’s worth is tied to her purity, and she must bleed to prove it. But when Deka bleeds gold – the colour of impurity, of a demon – she faces a consequence worse than death. She is saved by a mysterious woman who tells Deka of her true nature: she is an Alaki, a near-immortal with exceptional gifts. The stranger offers her a choice: fight for the Emperor, with others just like her, or be destroyed…

Orlando

As his tale begins, Orlando is a passionate young nobleman whose days are spent in rowdy revelry, filled with the colourful delights of Queen Elizabeth’s court. By the close, he will have transformed into a modern, thirty-six-year-old woman and three centuries will have passed. Orlando will not only witness the making of history from its edge, but will find that his unique position as a woman who knows what it is to be a man will give him insight into matters of the heart.

Critical, But Stable

No one ever tells you the cost of a perfect life … The Msibis, the Manamelas and the Jiyas are high-flying married couples who belong to the Khula Society, a social club with investment and glitzy benefits. The wives are smart, successful in their chosen careers and they lead lifestyles to match – jostling for pole position in the ‘Keeping up with the Khumalos’ stakes. The husbands have had their successes and failures, sometimes keeping dubious company and getting to the top of their fields by whatever means necessary. Beneath the veneer of marital bliss, however, lie many secrets. What will happen to their relationships when a devastating event affects all their lives?

White Ivy

Ivy Lin was a thief. But you’d never know it to look at her…

Ivy Lin, a Chinese immigrant growing up in a low-income apartment complex outside Boston, is desperate to assimilate with her American peers. Her parents disapprove, berating her for her mediocre grades and what they see as her lazy, entitled attitude. But Ivy has a secret weapon, her grandmother Meifeng, from whom she learns to shoplift to get the things she needs to fit in.

Ivy develops a taste for winning and for wealth. As an adult, she reconnects with the blond-haired golden boy of a prominent political family, and thinks it’s fate. But just as Ivy is about to have everything she’s ever wanted, a ghost from her past resurfaces, threatening the almost-perfect life she’s worked so hard to build.

Filled with surprising twists, and offering sharp insights into the immigrant experience, White Ivy is both a love triangle and a coming-of-age story – as well as a dark glimpse at what can happen when we yearn for success at any cost.

Magic Lessons

We first met the Owens in the glorious novel Practical Magic. We discovered the tragedy of the Owens siblings in Rules of Magic. Now we learn how it all began… with a baby abandoned in a snowy English field in the 1600s. Under the care of gentle Hannah Owens, little Maria learns about the ‘Unnamed Arts’. Maria has a gift for them – a gift that may well prove her undoing.

When Maria is abandoned by the man she loves, she invokes the curse that will haunt her family for centuries. Because magic has rules, and they must be followed. This is the lesson that Maria will carry with her for the rest of her life, and pass on to her children and her children’s children.

Catherine House

During your three years at Catherine House, you will have no contact with those in the outside world.

You will not leave the grounds during your time at the college.

If we believe you have wandered from the path of learning, you may be sent to the tower.

Each of our students has been selected as someone who belongs here at Catherine. You will give to Catherine, and Catherine will give to you. We will not let each other down.

Catherine House is a university like no other. Into its celebrated world steps Ines, a young woman who welcomes the school’s isolation rather than its illustrious past. As the gates close and Ines finds herself start to be inevitably seduced by its magnetic power, she also begins to realise the question isn’t why she chose to come to Catherine House; but why Catherine House chose her.

Love in Colour

Bolu Babalola finds the most beautiful love stories from history and mythology and rewrites them with incredible new detail and vivacity in this debut collection. Focusing on the magical folktales of West Africa, Babalola also reimagines iconic Greek myths, ancient legends from the Middle East, and stories from countries that no longer exist in our world.

A high-born Nigerian goddess feels beaten down and unappreciated by her gregarious lover and longs to be truly seen.

A young businesswoman attempts to make a great leap in her company, and an even greater one in her love life.

A powerful Ghanaian spokeswoman is forced to decide whether to uphold her family’s politics, or to be true to her heart.

Whether captured in the passion of love at first sight, or realising that self-love takes precedent over the latter, the characters in these vibrant stories try to navigate this most complex human emotion and understand why it holds them hostage.

Moving exhilaratingly across perspectives, continents and genres, from the historic to the vividly current, Love in Colour is a celebration of romance in all of its forms.

The Big South African Hair Book

The Big South African Hair Book is a celebration and must-read exploration of our #NaturalHair community. Part peek into what’s causing generations of women to ditch chemical relaxers, and part practical haircare guide, this book is an indispensable companion for everyone from the curl-curious to #NaturalHair veterans. Hilarious and hair-volutionary, this book, a first of its kind on South African shelves, is filled with advice, tried and tested tricks and tips and haircare testimonials.