Reading takes you places
This popular epithet in praise of reading perfectly captures some of the gems on Exclusive Books Recommends promotion for March.
Some books create world, some capture lost ones.
Multiple award winning book like One Hundred Saturdays – Stella Levy and the Search for a lost worlds – is such a book. With nearly a century of life behind her, Stella Levi had never before spoken in detail about her past. Then she met Michael Frank. He came to her Greenwich Village apartment one Saturday afternoon to ask her a question about the Juderia, the neighborhood on the Greek island of Rhodes where she’d grown up in a Jewish community that had thrived there for half a millennium. Probing and courageous, candid and sly, Stella offers a magical modern-day window into what it was like to grow up in an extraordinary place in an extraordinary time—and to construct a life after that place has
vanished.
Another woman forced to invent and reinvent her life and home is Noni Jabavu, the first black South African woman to publish books on her life. Returning to SA in 1977 to write a biography of her illustrious father, she is a travelling black woman of means navigating the cruelty and infigny of Apartheid South Africa. Her book A Stranger at Home captures
the inner and outer conflicts.
The words women leave behind, and the worlds created in their wake, is at the heart of David Ralph Viviers’s book, Mirage. A century-old trunk has been dug up near the railway village of Sterfontein, deep in heart of the karoo. Inside is the lost journal of Victorian author Elizabeth Tenant – and what appear to be the remains of a child. Without much to go on, university student Michael travels to the old Karoo hotel where Elizabeth wrote her novel Mirage, and amidst talk of omens in the sky, ancient prophecies and the end of the world, he tries to decipher the journal’s secrets. You can smell the karoo in these pages, in fact, it’s almost a character itself.
Then for a book not about lost worlds, but about fast disappearing ones: The Golden Mole, and other Living Treasure, by Katherine Rundell. The Golden Mole is a celebration of 22 species, each of which is either endangered or “contains a subspecies that is endangered”. Katherine Rundell is a scholar, a born enthusiast and an exquisite writer. The words are beautiful, and the black and gold illustrations even more so. Rundell’s chapters are never more than eight pages long, but all are full of vivid, sometimes surprising details about the creatures themselves, the stories we tell about them, the ways we have interacted with them and why they are now endangered. A magnificent celebration of everything from bats, crows and hedgehogs to narwhals and wombats.
Lastly, our hero title in the stores is The Day of Fallen Night, by Samantha Shannon – the first time we are leading the in-store campaign with a title at Young Adults. This title, the stunning, standalone prequel to the New
York Times bestselling The Priory of the Orange Tree. With its dragons, magic, and fully developed world, this fantastical epic contains all the critical elements of high fantasy. The book is aimed at the YA market. But Shannon, together with Sarah J Maas, are part of the current push of YA authors to be ‘categorised’ and to write for an adult market. The crossover appeal of their existing respective lists makes this a possible transition, and we watch the trend with interest.
These are just some of the titles featured on Exclusive Books Recommends in March. All promise to
take you places – weird, wonderful, magical and magnificent. Fanatics members earn a whopping 200 bonus points on their Exclusive Books Recommends titles from the list during March.
Exclusive Books recommended titles are merchandised in front of all their stores every month and are carefully curated in different categories. The aim is to assist customers to see at a glance, and in a short space of time, titles that are new, trending and have caught the eyes of the Exclusive Books buyers in among 1000’s of titles. There are choices for all genre tastes, and now the dedicated EBR for children will offer an even wider and deeper rage for younger readers.
Exclusive Books Recommends – Exclusive Books
Fiction
Non-Fiction
Young Adult
10 -12
0 – 5
More on Exclusive Books
Exclusive Books are hosting real life book launches again Events – Exclusive Books. or alternatively can follow us on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/ExclusiveBooks , Instagram https://www.instagram.com/exclusivebooks/ Twitter http://www.twitter.com/exclusivebooks or www.exclusivebooks.co.za
Visit www.exclusivebooks.co.za for their new and improved gift voucher offering – beautiful templates for every occasion and the ability to personalise messages and time delivery. Ways to order books from Exclusive Books include phone in, uber eats, instore of course and online via the website www.exclusivebooks.co.za and delivery to your doorstep in 36 hours.(free delivery for order R450 and up).
Exclusive Books is one of South Africa’s largest bookselling chains with stores throughout South Africa, and one store in Gaborone, Botswana and in Namibia.
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