Book reviews: Pleasure & White

Pleasure

Rating:
Author: Nthikeng Mohlele
Released by: Picador Africa
Pages: 182
ISBN: 9781770104853

First published in 2016 and long listed for the International Dublin Literary Award, which is one of the world’s most valuable annual literary prizes, Nthikeng Mohlele’s Pleasure is drawn against a canvas of wartime Europe and modern-day Cape Town.

Thoughtful, eccentric and besieged by the erotic and the sensual, the protagonist Milton Mohlele sacrifices all for a glimpse into the secrets and deceptions of pleasure and how powerless those apparent insights are in the vast scale of life in its absurdity and glory.

Pleasure is contemporary local fiction at its best.

White

Rating:
Author: Bret Easton Ellis
Released by: Pan Macmillian
Pages: 261
ISBN: 9781529012439

Best known for his fictional provocative, bestselling novels American Psycho and Less Than Zero, this is Bret Easton Ellis’ first work of non-fiction.

In White, Ellis offers a broad-based exploration of what the heck is going on right now with – among other topics – Hollywood, social media and Trump.

Written with razor-sharp precision, White is a brutal dissection of how our culture, politics and relationships have changed over the last 40 years and is as riveting as his masterfully crafted earlier fictional works.

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