South Africa has produced extraordinary writing — history, fiction, and memoir — that gives real texture to a place with a complicated past.
Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela is the obvious starting point. Mandela's autobiography is a patient, generous account of his life from rural Transkei to Robben Island to the presidency. It is also an account of South Africa's 20th century from the inside.
Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee (1999) is the most important South African novel of the post-apartheid era — bleak, precise, and deeply uncomfortable. It won the Booker Prize and is set partly in Cape Town, partly in the Eastern Cape.
An Act of Terror by André Brink is a long, politically charged thriller set in late-apartheid South Africa. Brink was one of the Afrikaner writers who broke with the establishment, and the novel is also a vivid portrait of the country and its tensions.
The Power of One by Bryce Courtenay — set in the 1930s and 1940s, following an English-speaking South African boy navigating a world of Afrikaner nationalism and black suffering. It has been criticised for sentimentality, but as a portrait of the era it is compelling.
A Human Being Died That Night by Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela is a psychologist's account of her interviews with Eugene de Kock, the apartheid-era police death-squad commander. Difficult and important.
The Washing of the Spears by Donald R. Morris is the definitive account of the rise and fall of the Zulu nation, particularly the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879. Necessary reading before visiting KwaZulu-Natal.
The Covenant by James Michener — a long, novelistic history of South Africa from its earliest inhabitants to the apartheid era. Excellent for getting a sweep of the country's history on a long flight.
Triomf by Marlene van Niekerk is a darkly comic novel about a poor white Afrikaner family in the Johannesburg suburb built on the ruins of Sophiatown. Confronting and brilliant.