BOOK CLUB | Shirley Gunn & Shanil Haricharan, Patti Smith, Alexandra Fuller

Three fascinating life stories this week

September 01, 2019 at 00:00 am

This is an edited extract from Voices from the Underground: Eighteen life stories from Umkhonto weSizwe’s Ashley Kriel Detachment, edited by Shirley Gunn and Shanil Haricharan, published by Penguin Random House SA, R320 (Shirley Gunn)

0 of 3

Published in the Sunday Times: 01/09/2019

For many years members of Umkhonto we Sizwe have kept their counsel about their operations in the 1980s.

Now, in Voices from the Underground (Penguin Non-Fiction), 18 comrades from the Ashley Kriel Detachment in the Western Cape reveal their nail-biting deeds during that time and the burden of living a double life.

Legendary singer and poet Patti Smith chronicles a year of her life as she navigates loss, ageing and the seismic shift in US politics in Year of the Monkey (Bloomsbury).

Alexandra Fuller suffered her own seismic shift when her father died. In Travel Light, Move Fast (Serpent's Tail), she examines his bold, eccentric life with affection.