Showing results by author "Johann Wentzel" in All Categories

A WORD BEFORE THE JOURNEY The Namib Frontiers Collection gathers together five novels of land, memory, courage, love, grief, belonging, and the difficult roads by which southern Africa shapes those who live within its reach. From the still vastness of Etosha and the mystery of the White Lady Road to Kazungula, the Zambezi frontier, the forgotten land of Itenge, and the harsher older fireline of Kunene Fire, these books are bound by place, family, endurance, and the moral beauty of lives lived with dignity under African skies. These are stories of silence and storm, of frontier roads and ...

Three unforgettable novels. One sweeping Southern African journey. The African Horizons Trilogy brings together The Dust and the English Rose, Stars over the Limpopo, and The Franschhoek Promise in one richly atmospheric volume of love, land, loss, endurance, and belonging. Set against the vast beauty of southern Africa — from the dry reaches of the interior to the vineyards and mountains of the Cape — these novels follow men and women whose lives are shaped by distance, family, memory, and the landscapes that both test and sustain them. Here, love is rarely easy, promises are not ...

A warm, uplifting companion novel to Kunene Fire. Years after the death of Izan Bloem, his daughters Elize and Sandra finally make the journey they have postponed for too long: a trip to Namibia, the country of their father’s birth, to find his grave and understand the life he left behind. Joined by their teenage sons, they travel north through a country their father had loved deeply—but in the Kaokoveld, a single mistake leaves them stranded, burned, frightened, and stripped of every comfort they brought with them from England. Rescued and taken to Ombari, they find not only safety, ...

A year after Linda’s death, her family returns to the old house in Northern Ireland where memory still clings to every room. Linda was the centre of the family: wife, mother, grandmother, scientist, organiser, comforter, and the quiet force who held together lives now scattered across England and New Zealand. Her husband, Mark, has survived the year after her death by writing—turning memory, love, and grief into a shelf of manuscripts dedicated to the woman he cannot forget. But when he finally lays those books before his children, what he offers as an act of devotion is received as ...

The Second Review: When a celebrated literary critic is asked to answer a savage review of an anonymous novel, he is confronted with an impossible truth: the book under attack is his own. What begins as a private editorial problem quickly becomes something deeper and more dangerous. As hidden authorship, old wounds, public judgment, and private loyalties begin to converge, Ivin Vale is forced to confront the uneasy distance between the man he has been in public and the man he has been in private. What follows is not simply a literary scandal, but a searching reckoning with pride, marriage, ...

The north of Namibia is a land of dust, stone, and ancient silence — a place where desert elephant walk old hidden routes, black rhino vanish into thorn, and the wrong men can disappear without a trace. Set against this vast beauty of Namibia, Kunene Fire is a gripping adventure of loyalty, courage, redemption, and sacrifice — perfect for readers who love high-stakes African thrillers with heart, depth, and unforgettable landscapes. It is here that Izan Bloem returns after the death of his wife, hoping to walk his grief through under an honest sky. What he finds instead is a brutal ...

The Franschhoek Promise Book Three of The African Horizons Series After loss, danger, and the hard-won building of a life in the Limpopo valley, the van As family enters a new season. The beloved headmaster of the valley school has died, and the whole community gathers to honour a man whose life changed the future of its children. Into the life of the school steps Marinette, a gifted teacher and counsellor whose strength, warmth, and intelligence soon make her indispensable — and bring her steadily closer to Ty. At the same time, Liesl has grown into a painter of rare power. Her ...

The world ended long ago. But its secrets did not. Millions of years after life on Earth has vanished, a team of alien archaeologists lands on a dead and silent planet beneath a dying sun. What they expect to find are the broken remains of a lost civilization. What they uncover is far stranger. Buried beneath red dust and stone lie endless rows of tiny wire chambers, vast processing halls, sealed military vaults, medical archives, fuel reserves, launch records, and the fossilized remains of millions upon millions of birds. At first, the evidence suggests a planet once ruled by these small ...

Life has been good to Flip and Charlotte van As. The river keeps giving diamonds, the community is thriving, and the school they helped build has become the pride of the Limpopo valley. Then the peace is broken. When Flip discovers a butchered rhinoceros and its orphaned calf near the family homestead, he knows at once that poachers have entered the valley. But this is no isolated crime. An international syndicate is moving through the once war-torn bush of southern Africa, using fear, money, and local coercion to hunt wildlife and threaten everything the valley has built. As danger spreads...

The Dust and the English Rose A Sweeping African Saga of Love, Loss and Second Chances He lost the land that shaped his life. She discovered a continent that would change hers forever. When Zimbabwe farmer Flip van As is forced from the family farm his ancestors built, he begins again in the wild landscapes of southern Africa. Along the remote rivers and valleys of the continent he rebuilds his life — guided by honour, hard work, and a deep respect for the land and the people who call it home. During a safari expedition in the Zambezi Valley, fate intervenes when he rescues Charlotte ...

The White Lady Road Book Two of The Namib Frontiers Series After exposing a criminal line hidden beneath the silence of Etosha, Simon Shield and Elbereth are drawn into an even older and more dangerous struggle in Namibia’s north-west. A younger retired lawyer, John Young, asks for help from his discreet luxury camp in the koppies beyond the ordinary tourist roads. A guide has disappeared. Men with ministry language and contractor boots are taking an interest in old tracks they once ignored. And the route beneath Brandberg — the road most people know only through the legend of the White...

The Silence of Etosha Book One of The Namib Frontiers Series Simon Shield has spent his life reading stone, silence, and distance. A geologist and prospector working across Namibia, he knows how quickly beauty can be turned into value — and how often remoteness becomes a cover for power. When a field assignment near Etosha begins to expose hidden transport routes, frightened workers, and evidence that something far darker than geology is moving through the concession margins, Simon is drawn into a conflict that reaches far beyond mining. Beside him stands Elbereth: a compulsive reader, a ...

The Elephant Road Book Four of The Namib Frontiers Series After the devastating loss at Kazungula, Elbereth cannot yet return to Swakopmund. Instead she finds a fragile refuge in Nata, near the shimmering vastness of the Makgadikgadi Salt Pans, where flamingos, game, silence, and distance become the first landscape large enough to hold her grief. There, in a small and out-of-the-way B&B run by Anne-Marie and Barry, she begins the slow, unwilling work of continuing. A book left quietly on her table by John Young becomes the first sign that grief may be shared without being spoken over. As ...

The Copper of Itenge Book Five of The Namib Frontiers Series The final novel in the acclaimed Namib Frontiers Series, The Copper of Itenge is the story of Michael Stent — explorer, adventurer, road man, and the next great moral force in southern Africa. When Elbereth and John Young discover a file among Simon Shield’s final records in Swakop, they uncover satellite images suggesting rich untapped copper deposits north of Kazungula Crossing. Simon’s note is clear: this is not one country’s problem, but a dangerous frontier where four sovereignties, old forgotten history, and living ...

The Kazungula Crossing Book Three of The Namib Frontiers Series While Elbereth is in Freetown, Sierra Leone, helping communities threatened by a failing dam and worsening water crisis, Simon Shield, Wynand, and John Young travel east for a tiger fish expedition near Kazungula, gathering provisions through Katima Mulilo, a place heavy with old army memory and unfinished roads. There, by chance, old bonds deepen and new ones begin. Ty van As and Daniel du Toit cross their path, and a young cyclist named Michael Stent, riding alone from Cape Town to Lilongwe, is drawn into their camp and their...

A thought-provoking look into the brilliant mind of a person diagnosed with Schizophrenia as he slips in and out of reality.

Where is my tickey? Isn’t it strange that I had to get to the end of the road to be able to see the start? A road that never ends and where a stop is only made when it is too late and I travel sick...A road shared with many. I had to turn 54 before I could read the road ahead. The road up to 54 was interesting. The road after 54 an experience...Not all the people who travelled with me up to 54 could always keep up. Not everybody travels the same road; there are turn-offs and stalls.

Bleed for the Queen is in part the story of Kobus Cronje, a pathologist from South Africa in Northern Ireland and his attempt to come to terms with the philosophical and psychological consequences of the brutal murder of his sister-in-law and her five month old baby. Bleed for the Queen is also the story of the city Londonderry. A 400-year old city that he felt he had to defend no matter what the cost. Kobus Cronje, the main character, losing touch with reality more and more....

It was a hard battle and it took time to sink in that it was finally behind us. The medical and surgical teams from the Neurology department at the University of Chicago must have been totally drained working in an unique environment once the go ahead was received for their high impact life-saving intervention.

It started during one of those boring never-ending commuting journeys shared with my publishing agent and lifelong friend Jan. Jan suggested an easy-to-listen on-the-go detective lose-hanging piece to kill start-stop commuting time. Maybe a bit of light-hearted investigator reading fun that one could start and then put down with your train timetable and front door key just to be picked up again tomorrow morning.