Reads that resonate, from a gripping thriller to unforgettable memoir and moving fiction

The House of Water by Fflur Dafydd (Hodder and Stoughton, 2025) 

Set in the fictional Welsh town of Pont Sulyn, The House of Water unfolds in a place once torn apart by a river that flooded and reshaped everything it touched. 

One night, Iona Griffri returns home to find her entire family murdered, and a stranger dead in her bed. Her father is missing. In the aftermath, she forms an uneasy friendship with the morgue attendant who worked on her family’s bodies, and together they begin to unearth what really happened that night.

It’s a gripping mystery and a haunting reflection on death, embodiment, and the fragile search for meaning. 

Water runs through the book like a living force: flood, destruction, renewal. After the killings, Iona’s home is submerged; her town, too, has been drowned and rebuilt by the river. Dafydd uses water as metaphor and mirror: to flow with life, to drown in grief, to find sustenance again. 

What makes the book unforgettable is its rootedness in Welsh language and culture. Dafydd captures the intimacy of community, the poetry of landscape, and the melancholy beauty of a town that once died, and in its own way is recommissioned for life again. 

A gripping literary thriller.

The Comrade’s Wife by Barbara Boswell (Jacana Media, 2024)

All right, confession: I didn’t read The Comrade’s Wife this past month. I devoured it a while back, in two sittings, unable to put it down. But it belongs here, especially now that it’s swept the NACA Award for Outstanding Fiction, jointly won the 2025 UJ Prize, and been shortlisted for the Sunday Times Literary Award.

Boswell has that rare gift: she writes with literary grace but never drifts into pretension. Her prose is elegant, precise, but alive; you don’t read it to admire her cleverness, you read it because she pulls you under.

The story follows Claire, an academic who falls for Neil, a charming politician. He wines and dines her in Cape Town’s most exclusive restaurants, lavishing her with gifts, massages and the illusion of perfect care. Claire basks in it, in the glow of being loved so completely.

What unfolds is a hypnotic study of love’s darker architecture: manipulation, gaslighting, psychological erosion. 

Boswell captures, with painful precision, how women begin to doubt their own sanity, how care becomes currency, and how survival often means clawing one’s way back to selfhood. The Comrade’s Wife is both a love story and an autopsy: on devotion, on power, and on what remains when a woman finally walks out of the wreckage. 

Good Luck to Us All: A Graphic Memoir of Sorts by Karen Vermeulen (Catalyst Press, 2025) 

I don’t even know where to begin with this one. Good Luck to Us All tackles big, serious themes: being single in a world obsessed with coupledom, mental health, self worth. And yet, I don’t remember the last time a book made me laugh so hard I had to put it down to breathe.

Told through Karen Vermeulen’s delightful illustrations and text, it’s part comic, part memoir, and entirely original. 

Vermeulen, an artist, illustrator and teacher, brings her world to life with wit and tenderness. The interplay between her words and drawings makes for something far more sophisticated than a comic book, it is visual storytelling with heart and bite.

Vermeulen reflects on what it means to be in your forties, juggling therapy, dating, community, self-confidence, Botox, cats, and the chaos of being human. And if you’ve ever swiped through a dating app, her chapter on The Apps is a masterclass: painfully accurate, wickedly funny, and one of the highlights of my month.

The book is honest, hilarious, and deeply relatable, a love letter to singlehood, self-awareness, and the quiet courage it takes to build a life on our own terms.

Unbreakable: A Woman’s Guide to Ageing with Power by Dr Vonda Wright (Penguin Random House, 2025)

Over the past two years, I’ve made a few firm, and, as it turns out, slightly delusional decisions about my health. 

“No more cardio,” I told myself. “I’ve graduated from it.” 

I convinced myself that late-night reading after a long workday was a form of self-care, that I was a model of good health. 

Unbreakable shattered some of those illusions, but gently, and with purpose. It’s less a reprimand than a revelation: a new way to think about longevity as an act of kindness and self-love.

Written in an accessible, energising tone, Dr Vonda Wright breaks down the five key hallmarks of ageing: DNA damage, chronic inflammation, mitochondrial dysfunction (the health of our mitochondria being shaped by what we eat and how we move), zombie cells (damaged cells that refuse to die, releasing toxic signals), and stem cell exhaustion. 

She explains, with clarity and warmth, how each can be influenced by small, sustainable shifts in lifestyle and, reassuringly, that we don’t need punishing cardio marathons to keep our mitochondria happy. Drawing on her experience as an orthopaedic surgeon, Wright shows how strong skeletal muscle underpins healthy ageing, and how mindset might be our most powerful muscle of all. 

The book challenges the quiet narratives we carry: the “I can’t”, the “I’m too old”, and replaces them with a new one: that strength, vitality, and power are choices we can still make, at any age. 

Burning Down the House: A Feminist Appraisal of Space compiled and edited by Mbali Mazibuko, Shakeelah Ismail, Charisse Louw, Ijeoma Chidi Opara and Stella Viljoen (Karavan Press, 2025)

Burning Down the House is a searing and tender feminist collection that uses the architecture of a house to rethink the home as a space of both governance and resistance. 

Each essay inhabits a different room: the kitchen, the bedroom, foyer, turning personal stories into political reflections. Vulnerability and memory become instruments for reimagining what “home” means, and who it serves.

The book feels especially urgent in a South African context, where the home can be a site of both harm and refuge. It holds that contradiction close, never letting the reader forget that safety and danger often coexist under the same roof.

What makes this collection stand out is the care behind it: the editors brought together feminists across race, age and sexuality in an intentionally collective process. They wrote, reflected, and retreated together, the act of writing as a feminist community becoming as important as the finished work itself.

Beyond its literary craft, Burning Down the House is a meditation on feminism’s unfinished work, its failures, its fatigue and its fire. It asks what we might need to rebuild social change from the inside out. 

All proceeds go to Women for Change. DM

Joy Watson is Daily Maverick’s Book Editor at Large.