Melville bookstore hosts launch of new children’s book

An enchanted fairy-tale and proudly South African story, Arabella, the Moon and the Mongogo Nut is about eleven-year-old Arabella who leaves her quiet home in Parkview and enters a magical parallel universe. “It is aimed at the tweeny market – especially for girls who are often voracious readers at that age,” says author Hamilton Wende. A war correspondent and thriller author, this is Wende’s first children’s book. The imagery shifts between African and Western symbolism, says Wende, just as kids today do as they encounter different cultures and ways of living.