Book your holiday: Cape Town

Cape Town is one of most uniquely beautiful cities in the world, a rugged coastal sprawl presided over by the imperious Table Mountain (named because it is flat-topped and perpetually shrouded in white cloud), full of gorgeous beaches, sprawling forest and vine-strewn valleys.

All that natural beauty, and a cultural reputation to match. Many of Africa’s most innovative contemporary artists can be found in the MOCAA, while Cape Town’s live music, bar and restaurant scene is second to none. 

And yet, as with many great cities, Cape Town is marked by terrible poverty, its infamous shantytowns a stark reminder to any visitor that, for all the political gains of post-athertid South Africa, much work remains to be done.

Here are five books that go some way to capturing the pride and shame, joy and pain of South Africa's ‘Mother City’.

Muriel at Metropolitan by Miriam Tlali (1979)

This trailblazing semi-autobiographical novel had a difficult birth. Written in 1969, it was rejected by publishers for six years before being banned shortly after it made it into print – already in censored form – in 1975. Nevertheless, Miriam Tlali’s account of her experiences of an office clerk was eventually published in full in 1979 and went on to make history as the first English-language novel written by a Black woman to be published in South Africa.

And what a novel. In it the narrator describes her daily working life at a furniture and electronics store, where the readers find a microcosm of the racial inequality prevalent throughout South Africa. Muriel’s white colleagues treat her with shocking levels of contempt, as do the police. In time these experiences lead to a political awakening and radicalises Muriel against the state, leading to a bold act of rebellion.     

Although technically set in Johannesburg, Muriel at Metropolitan is a landmark novel in the story of South African literature and an insightful human story that gives context to the political revolution that defines Cape Town’s modern history.

Life Times by Nadine Gordimer (2011)

“Short-story writers see by the light of the flash; theirs is the only thing one can be sure of - the present moment.” This is how 19991 Nobel Prize for Literature winner Nadine Gordimer described the area of her craft she perfected above perhaps all overs – although she also produced wonderful novels, plays and journalism over a celebrated writing career.

A life deeply entwined with South Africa’s modern history, she was active in the anti-apartheid movment, joined the African National Congress and even advised Nelson Mandela on speech writing when he was on trial in 1964. But it was her brilliant, incisive short stories, which moved deftly through all ranks and files of South African life, that won her literary fame with readers around the world, including from the pages of the New Yorker.

It’s a body of work that can seem as difficult to conquer as Table Mountain, so this collection is a great place to start exploring one of the South Africa’s finest fiction writers.