South African Historical Novelist

Clive Algar was born in Cape Town in 1942 and has also lived in Johannesburg, Namibia and London. He was a group executive in an international mining company and started writing fiction when he retired and returned to South Africa.

His first novel, Journeys to the End of the World, was published in 2007, and his second, Flowers in the Sand, in 2011. His third novel, Comets, was published as an eBook in 2013. He was invited to contribute a short story to a new Afrikaans anthology of Boer War stories (Boereoorlogstories 2) which was published by Tafelberg in 2012. His story “The Twins” appears in translation.

Talking about Books

The Story of San Michele

The Story of San Michele

When I first read “The Story of San Michele”, by Axel Munthe, many years ago as an impressionable young man, I considered it a great find. The San Michele of the title was the name of the author's villa on the island of Capri, but the book is in fact a wide-ranging...

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Cider with Rosie

Cider with Rosie

I don't do many reviews, and those I do are likely to be old favourites from my bookshelf which might be overlooked today by busy people who weren't around when they were first published. "Cider with Rosie", by Laurie Lee, is one of those. First published in 1959, it...

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Wide Sargasso Sea

Wide Sargasso Sea

Recently I re-read "Wide Sargasso Sea", the fascinating novel by Jean Rhys (first published in 1966 when the author was 76) which tells the "back story" of the mad wife in the attic in Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre". Set mainly in the vivid landscape of Jamaica in the...

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