Mercia S. Burger's winners

Books 2025

I started with a much longer list of favourite books and wanted to say something brief about each. But “brief” doesn’t come easily to me. In the end, I said far too much about just a few books.
Here are the books:

The Queen of the Sky (with plenty of turbulence)

The Aviator and the Showman (2025) by Laurie Gwen Shapiro

The aviator is Amelia Earhart, and the showman is publisher George Putnam — her husband, manager, spin doctor, and, according to everyone who knew them as a couple, an opportunistic hustler and a rather unpleasant man.

Earhart was the first woman to cross the Atlantic Ocean as a solo pilot, and in 1937 she undertook — with George’s loud applause — the first solo flight around the world. Somewhere over a misty sea she lost radio contact, and that’s where she disappeared. Naturally, this gave rise to legends, wild guesses, and conspiracy theories. What really happened?

“I wish you wouldn’t go off and commit suicide, because that’s exactly what you’re doing …” a friend warned her before that flight. No one was surprised when she didn’t return — and now I understand why.
This woman didn’t just crack the chauvinistic glass ceiling — she blew out the ceiling entirely and installed a new one with lights and a ceiling fan.

The Aviator and the Showman by Laurie Gwen Shapiro is published by Penguin Putnam Inc and costs R835 at Exclusive Books.

A Good Moment

Raising Hare (2025) by Chloe Dalton

This recipe always works: a depressed person comes into contact — sometimes reluctantly — with a little animal, and before you know it, the depressed person owns a coffee mug with that animal’s picture on it.

Helen Macdonald did it with H is for Hawk (2014), but Macdonald’s fierce hawk is nowhere near as playful and cute as Dalton’s H is for Hare. “Louder than a puff, sharper than a sigh, softer than a grunt and more musical like a snort …”
Naturally there are predictable insights:

“I had come to appreciate that affection for an animal is of a different kind entirely — untinged by regret, complexities, and compromise of human relationships.”
But this book will definitely afford you a good reading moment.

Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton is published by Canongate Books and costs R610 at Exclusive Books.

The Weirdo

The Chronology of Water (2011) by Lidia Yuknavitch

I read The Chronology of Water a few years ago, and it’s since become a cult favourite. A champion swimmer wrecks her life through self-destructive behaviour and uses those experiences as a blood-and-water process to become a writer. It’s a literary battlefield — fragmentary, raw, honest, erotic, humorous, and brutally written.

This year, Kristen Stewart — yes, the very same unenthusiastic heroine from teen blockbusters like Twilight — made her directorial debut at the Cannes Film Festival with Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water, earning a standing ovation. “The violent experience of being a woman,” she summed up the film — and she certainly didn’t mean only physical violence. Give them hell, Kristen.

Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton is published by Canongate Books and costs R610 at Exclusive Books.

In Good and Not-So-Good Times

A Truce that is not Peace (2025) by Miriam Toews

This memoir consists of Toews’s diaries, correspondence, quotes, letters, and memories — “… the spit of the land where writing lives” — after losing both her father and later her sister to suicide.

I know — we’ve all had quite enough of our own and others’ miseries. Yet the text isn’t as grief-stricken and harrowing as one might expect. Toews remains light-footed:

“But what if we don’t conceive of life as a tragedy? Can we live it?”

A Truce that is not Peace by Miriam Toews is published by HarperCollins and costs R546 at Exclusive Books.

Something Political

Good Jew, Bad Jew (2023) by Steven Friedman

Controversial and at times a bit academic, but for anyone working toward a thoughtful opinion on the Israel–Palestine conflict — don’t read only this book, but certainly let it be one among many on the subject.

Good Jew, Bad Jew by Steven Friedman is published by Wits University Press uitgegee and costs R340 at Exclusive Books.

Short Stories

Good and Evil and Other Stories (2025) by Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell, and The World Goes On (2017) by László Krasznahorkai, translated by John Bakti et al.

The dwindling publication of short story collections isn’t just my imagination — there’s simply too little money.

This year I had to search far and wide, but luckily found Good and Evil and Other Stories by Argentine author Samanta Schweblin. She is able to write a short story about almost anything, sometimes with a touch of magical realism, and I’m impressed.

I also revisited Nobel Prize winner László Krasznahorkai’s unconventional short stories in The World Goes On. It isn’t his most accessible work, but I include it because I have a story to tell.

In New York I attended the launch of this book. Krasznahorkai looked like one of the good guys — soft-spoken, shy, hesitant, with a half-smile, his face set in a strong bone structure and nearly transparent, watery blue eyes, his beige jacket loose and pointy. (Few people can pull off a beige jacket.)

He apologized several times for his poor English, and when he read one of his stories, he struggled with the pronunciation of “suitcases.” I heard a bit of Gertrude Stein’s rhythm with a touch of Joyce. Even then, there was talk that he might one day win the Nobel Prize.

He delivered his Nobel lecture in Hungarian, his face fuller and calmer.
You can listen to his speech here.

And like someone who is bleeped out after winning a Golden Globe and holding forth too long in their acceptance speech, I’ll quickly and prematurely slip in Bread of Angels (2025) — Patti Smith’s addition to her previous memoirs — and Zadie Smith’s new essays, Dead and Alive (2025), even though I haven’t read them yet.