The Garden of Bad Flowers by Sandile Memela. A Durban-set novel of post-apartheid disillusionment by a writer who knows the city's neighbourhoods and politics from inside.
Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton (1948). Paton was a Natal schoolteacher and his great novel runs from the Ixopo countryside south of Durban through the city itself; it remains a foundational South African text and explains a great deal of the country's geography of race.
Mahatma Gandhi: His Life and Ideas by Joseph Doke. Doke was a Durban Baptist minister and Gandhi's friend; his short 1909 biography was the first ever written and was largely composed during Gandhi's South African years at Phoenix Settlement.
Black Diamond by Zakes Mda. A KwaZulu-Natal noir set in Durban and Pietermaritzburg, fast and funny, with a fine ear for the city's many languages.
Indaba, My Children by Credo Mutwa. Zulu folklore retold by the great sangoma writer, much of the action set in the Natal hinterland. Strange, beautiful, and impossible to put down once you start.