BOOK REVIEWS: Your next reads: Eerie magical realism and a sex-positive guide

As winter reluctantly slips away, here are your latest reading recommendations: one that will keep you up at night, and one that will keep you up at night for entirely different reasons.

Flying Cows and Other Traumas by Philisiwe Twijnstra I made the mistake of reading the first story in Philisiwe Twijnstra’s Flying Cows and Other Traumas late at night. I won’t say why. The reason is a spoiler, and you deserve to walk into it unaccompanied, at an hour when the house makes its own noises. I will say only that I put the book down properly frightened and did not pick it up again until the sun was fully up.

In daylight I went back and found something other than fear waiting: range, and an enormous wingspan. There are golden fishes. There are grannies wielding guns. There are cannibal girls, in a story that leans hard into horror.

What holds it together is one move, worked with vision: the ordinary is going about its business, and then something other gets into it. This is magical realism that knows exactly where it is standing.

South Africa does not have nearly as much speculative writing as it should. We have a literature that has been asked, for good historical reason, to be documentary: to testify, to record, to explain us to ourselves. What we have had less of is permission to invent.

Twijnstra owns that permission and the result is both an act of imagination and an argument for imagination. Published by Jacana, who took her on through their From Pitch to Publication programme, it is exactly the risk local publishing should be taking more often.

What I loved most is who stands at the centre of these stories. Black women, black queer women, hold the frame throughout, not as the subject of someone else’s speculation, but as the ones the strange things happen to and, more importantly, the ones who come out the other side having claimed power.

The collection is a celebration of local talent. A few stories arrive before they are ready, premises that deserved another draft. In a book this inventive the unevenness is conspicuous, because the strongest pieces show exactly what the weaker ones could have been.

But unevenness in a debut this ambitious is a small complaint, and an ordinary one. What is not ordinary is the scope: bold, capacious, willing to be daring and funny and terrifying in the same paragraph. Twijnstra is a playwright by training, and you can feel the theatre in her, the appetite for spectacle, holding the audience tight.

Flying Cows and Other Traumas by Philisiwe Twijnstra was published in April 2026. Retail price: About R240.

I got off a flight from Johannesburg to go to Nicki Brivik’s book launch in Cape Town, and what a launch it was: sex toys on sale along the back wall, a bitterly cold winter night outside, and an audience so committed to looking sexy that Brivik opened by thanking them for not wearing their puffer jackets. I spent the rest of the evening sitting on mine, attempting to cover its full circumference with my behind.

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