Illustrative Image: Compilation of book covers. (Images: Pan Macmillan / Bloomsbury / Jonathan Ball) 
And here we are, spinning headlong into the holidays, winding the year down while quietly doing mental arithmetic on the new-year resolutions we made back in January, which somehow feels like five minutes ago. December can feel like a lot. Any month can, really, but December comes with that extra flourish, a kind of emotional cherry on top.
When things tip towards overwhelm, there are always books. I hope you’re gifted a few, that your local library has something unexpected waiting for you, that you have friends with good taste who are generous enough to lend you theirs. These are the ones I’ve scrambled together for my beach bag.
Diplomatic Ties by Mpho Boshego
Debut author Mpho Boshego makes a confident entrance into fiction with Diplomatic Ties. Mbali Langa grows up in Mamelodi, where life is shaped by precarity and crowded domestic arrangements. Her mother has struggled with her mental health since Mbali’s father abandoned them, leaving them on her Gogo’s doorstep to share a home with aunts and an uncle battling alcoholism. Against this backdrop, Mbali is training to become a diplomat, determined to build a different life.
Things begins to shift when she enters into an illicit relationship with the Minister of International Relations and Cooperation, who starts funnelling money her way. The stakes rise further when Mbali is posted to Brussels, where the sheen of diplomatic life offers both escape and temptation. Boshego has spoken about her intention to write about black women beyond the familiar tropes of poverty, pain and endurance, and the novel holds this tension carefully. The harsh realities of Mamelodi are set against the opulence of diplomatic Brussels, without allowing either world to feel one-dimensional.
But life in diplomacy is not all champagne and receptions. Boshego deftly explores the mechanics of power, politics, greed and corruption, and the compromises demanded by proximity to influence. At the centre is Mbali’s transactional affair, a relationship that threatens to undo everything she has worked for. As Mbali weighs ambition against consequence, the novel asks how far one is willing to go to secure the life one wants, and at what cost.
Diplomatic Ties by Mpho Boshego was published in September 2025. Retail price around: R330.
The Three Widows by Irma Venter
Irma Venter never fails to delight. I read The Three Widows in Afrikaans (the English versions usually follow, but this one was not out at the time of publication). Journalist Ami Prinsloo is back on the scene. Her longtime friend, retired police general Paul de Jager, passes away and leaves her a letter asking her to investigate a cold case that has haunted him: a 15-year-old boy from Pretoria who went missing on his way to the corner café near his home. His request is that she work alongside his three ex-wives, each of whom holds a different piece of information relevant to the case.
One of the things I most love about Venter’s work is her ability to bring the South African landscape vividly to life. The Three Widows oscillates between the present, as Ami pursues the truth, and the 1990s, with scenes written from the perspectives of key characters at the time. The textures of that decade, its colours, moods and even its scent, are rendered with striking clarity.
You step into time with Eberhard Gouws, the boy who disappears, watching events unfold as they happen, and are then drawn back into the present as Ami interviews the same characters, now older and shaped by what came before. The novel evokes a powerful sense of nostalgia, time and place. I was gripped throughout, and the ending did not disappoint.
The Three Widows by Irma Venter was published in October 2025. Retail price: about R360.
Love, Zola by Zibu Sithole
With Love, Zola, Zibu Sithole brings her trilogy to a close in a way that resists spectacle and instead leans into something quieter and more resonant. The final instalment is less concerned with grand romantic resolution than with the slow, often uneasy work of becoming whole. Zola’s journey does not end with a neatly tied bow, but with a recalibration of self, a recognition that fulfilment does not always arrive through another person, but through self-acceptance and choice.
Across the trilogy, Sithole has traced the emotional terrain of contemporary womanhood with attentiveness and care. In this final book, the focus widens beyond Zola to include a constellation of women negotiating love, disappointment, ambition and reinvention. Some choose themselves boldly, others tentatively or imperfectly, but all are rendered with compassion. Sithole is particularly skilled at portraying women in motion, caught between who they were taught to be and who they are becoming.
What distinguishes Love, Zola is its refusal to frame resilience as heroic suffering. These women are not celebrated for enduring endless hardship, but for their willingness to change course, to sit with uncertainty, and to rebuild after disappointment. Strength here is not rigid or performative. It is soft, mutable and deeply human.
Sithole’s writing is accessible without being simplistic, emotionally intelligent without tipping into sentimentality. She understands that many readers are no longer chasing idealised romance, but something steadier: peace, honesty, and the freedom to define happiness on their own terms. In this sense, the trilogy feels closely attuned to the moment we are living in, with women navigating evolving expectations around love, work and family.
Taken together, the three novels form a textured portrait of modern love and selfhood. Love, Zola closes the circle not by promising perfection, but by affirming that starting again is not failure. It is, sometimes, the bravest choice of all.
Love, Zola by Zibu Sithole was published in August 2025. Retail price: about R330.
Private Equity by Carrie Sun
Private Equity by Carrie Sun is the kind of memoir you inhale in one sitting. It is riveting, unsettling and quietly devastating. Sun lands a job at one of the most elite hedge funds in the world as the personal assistant to its billionaire founder, and takes the reader straight into a universe that presents itself as aspirational while quietly eroding everything human.
This is a world of obscene wealth wrapped in the language of optimisation. There is an in-house gym, branded activewear for staff, lavish parties where excess is normalised and waste is invisible. On paper, it looks like the pinnacle of success. In practice, it is a pressure cooker disguised as privilege. Sun’s first misstep comes immediately: she fails to respond to a late-night email from her boss on her first day, unaware that the job has no edges, no hours, no mercy. It sets the tone for what follows.
She is handed a document outlining 96 specific responsibilities and 13 broad expectations, including “extreme flexibility”, “no ego”, and a commitment to helping the firm “as needed”. The pay is extraordinary. The cost is everything else. Her boss is erratic, infantilised and tyrannical, offering feedback on her “energy”, her posture, her confidence. Employees are expected to be relentlessly healthy, productive and available. Sun learns to run on a treadmill while answering emails, her body and mind pushed into constant overdrive.
What makes Private Equity so powerful is not just its exposure of toxic work culture, but its clarity about complicity. This is an ecosystem sustained by people who normalise the abuse, sneer at those who cannot endure it, and refuse to question the moral vacuum at its centre. Sun is incisive about the closed circuit of billionaire wealth, and the complete absence of reckoning with inequality or extraction.
This is not a story about ambition rewarded. It is about what happens when money becomes the only measure of worth, and how much of yourself you can lose while being told you are lucky to be there.
Private Equity by Carrie Sun was published in February 2024. Retail price: about R335. DM