Every week, in our shiny new TM LIVE studio, I spend some time talking books. This year I’ve interviewed some intriguing personalities, covering topics as diverse as the legacies of Steve Biko and Brenda Fassie, 9/11 in America, the South African Border War, and stuff South African white people like.

The TM LIVE Book Show airs every Thursday at 2 PM, and over the next couple of weeks I’ll be chatting to comedy legend John Cleese, as well as controversial journalist Mzilikazi wa Afrika, whose tell-all memoir Nothing Left to Steal is taking the country by storm.

Scroll down for highlights from the year so far:

Glenn Moss relives the intense student politics at Wits in the 70s in his absorbing book The New Radicals: A generational memoir of the 1970s, and speaks here about Steve Biko, the bitter Nusas trial and how the ideals of that generation have become frayed.

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Jaco van Schalkwyk is one of the most interesting new authors on the SA book scene, an acclaimed visual artist who has turned his hand to writing. He tells how his debut novel The Alibi Club is based on a real dive bar in New York, and rails at the aftermath of 9/11, which he witnessed firsthand.

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PJ Powers is one of South Africa’s most beloved performers, but her new autobiography Here I Am chronicles a dark, desperate period in her life. Here she speaks candidly about her alcoholism, the wreckage of her life and how she has emerged from it stronger than ever.

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The witty Hagen Engler lets rip in Stuff South African White People Like, sending up our predeliction for Tasha’s paninis, craft beers – and two-tone shirts. Here he points out that Johnny Clegg’s Zulu accent is “a bit off”.

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Amanda Coetzee is making a name for herself with her pacy thrillers, and her fourth, One Shot, has just been published. Here she talks about her intriguing detective, the enigmatic, gypsy-blooded Badger, and how she once worked at Holloway Women’s Prison.

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The irrepressible Bongani Madondo has edited a collection of essays on Brenda Fassie called I’m Not Your Weekend Special and here he remembers with affection the maddening, brilliant Ma Brr.

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South Africa’s new literary supernova Lauren Beukes talks about Detroit, the derelict setting of her new book Broken Monsters, and how thwarted creativity can turn malevolent.

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The effervescent British author Amanda Prowse was in South Africa to launch her novel Will You Remember Me? and talks about going from self-publishing to a place on the bestseller lists.

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American journalist Donna Bryson talks about her thoughtful, revealing book It’s A Black/White Thing, about racism in post-Independence South Africa.

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Michiel Heyns is one of South Africa’s most acclaimed novelists and translators. His latest novel A Sportful Malice is a slyly funny tale of love and revenge. Here he talks about Tuscany, “transnational” literature and the scourge of social media.

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Damon Galgut’s subtle new novel Arctic Summer charts the travels of the great author EM Forster in the years before he wrote his masterpiece A Passage to India. Here he talks about his extensive research into this quiet, repressed author, and the liberation Forster felt in Egypt and India.

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HSRC Press published a series of short studies on struggle heroes earlier this year called Voices of Liberation. One of the stand-out books was a study of Steve Biko by Professor Derek Hook. He spoke about Black Consciousness and Biko’s lasting legacy.

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Paul Morris served in the South African forces in the 80s when he was just 19 years old. Now he’s written a book about an epic bicycle journey he has made across that country in an effort to make peace with the ghosts of his past. He speaks here about the writing of Back to Angola: A Journey From War to Peace.

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Karen Rose is one of America’s favourite thriller writers. On a visit to South Africa she discussed her new novel Watch Your Back and how she creates strong women characters.

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Mark Gevisser’s brilliant Lost & Found in Johannesburg is part memoir, part social and historical investigation, and is one of the best books published this year. He explains how his childhood obsession with maps was the starting point for the work.

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In the book Back to Angola: A Journey from War to Peace, a former conscript in the SADF chronicles his epic cycle ride across the country as he lays to rest the ghosts that haunt him.

I spoke to author Paul Morris about his experiences. Click the “play” arrow below to listen to the podcast.

Back To Angola is published by Zebra Press.

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• Back to Angola by Paul Morris
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After telling the story of a Wyoming oilman in The Legend of Colton Bryant, Alexandra Fuller is back on familiar territory in this latest book, essentially a love letter to her “fierce, broken, splendid” mother.
We first met Nicola Fuller Of Central Africa ten years ago in Alexandra’s vivid childhood memoir Don’t Let’s Go To The Dogs Tonight. In it her mother was portrayed as eccentric, alcoholic and mentally unstable and she now refers to it as “that Awful Book”. Now, it seems, age and her own experiences as a mother have softened Alexandra’s stance and the woman who emerges from these pages is a complex, aristocratic, grand romantic. She is also immensely courageous.

Cocktail Hour traces Tim and Nicola Fuller’s own childhoods, his in England and his wife’s on the Isle of Skye and in Kenya. Her mother is, she writes, “one million percent Highland Scottish”, from the McDonald of Clanranald clan. “We’re very mystical, very savage people”, she tells her daughter.

She and Tim met in Kenya, a land, Fuller writes “of forbidding perfection”. Nicola was beautiful; Tim patricianly handsome and they were a glamorous couple. But Nicola’s desire for a glorious, adventurous colonial life was shattered over years of loss and hardship. Fuller tacks deftly backwards and forwards through their history, through wars and poverty, farms that went bad and others that were all-too-brief paradises.

From reading Dogs we know that Tim and Nicola lost three children, but still Fuller moves us to tears revisiting their deaths. Such is her range, though, she moves us to loud laughter in many chapters, too, such as an hilarious account of her mother dressing her up in an insecticide barrel for a fancy dress party. And as always in Fuller’s stories, peculiar characters abound: Nicola’s best friend in childhood was a chimpanzee called Stephen Foster; an ancestor called Muncle kidnapped two Tasmanian aborigines and brought them home to Skye; drunk grannies fried themselves in fireplaces and deranged ayahs pinched their charges black and blue.

The story has a happy ending. Tim and Nicola now farm successfully in Zambia, surrounded by grandchildren and the elderly set of orange Le Creuset pots that are virtually the only things they have carried with them over the years. Their story is one of deep love and endurance.

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• Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness by Alexandra Fuller
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Although this is a novel, Onion Tears is, like Paper Sons & Daughters, an intriguing portrait of a South African community. Shubnum Khan writes with affection and wry perception about the Muslim community in Mayfair , about broken families, enduring love and regret, and most of all, about food. For food is what defines Khadeejah Bibi Ballim, matriarch of her family.

“While some families dedicated their lives to sadness or to love, or to their careers, Khadeejah threw herself into her cooking. The way the finger ran over a firm tomato, the way the tongue moved over a good amli sauce, the way someone exhaled over after a hearty biryani provided Khadeejah with a pleasure she never found anywhere else in her life. She put her heart and soul (mingled with sadness and lost love) into her meals.”

Khadeejah’s daughter Summaya is a single mother, struggling to bring up the clever, impish Aneesa. Now eleven, Aneesa begins to sense there are secrets she is not being told. She no longer believes her father is dead as she has been told, and she’s determined to find out the truth.Scattered with the small dramas of meddling relatives and inquisitive neighbours, redolent with spices and scandals, this is a delightful book. I only wish the publishers had provided a glossary to the idiomatic speech.

• Onion Tears by Shubnum Khan
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As a foreign correspondent Tim Butcher has always had, as he says, front row seats in the making of history. As exhilarating as it was, covering wars in places like the Middle East, Kosovo and West Africa, he became dissatisfied with the inevitable superficiality of such coverage, feeling as if he was only ever getting part of the picture. In an effort to understand the genesis of the wars in West Africa he first travelled across the Congo, tracing the route of the explorer Henry Morton Stanley. The result of that expedition was the book Blood River: A Journey to Africa’s Broken Heart. It was a gripping book, tinged with menace and the regret of wasted potential, and it was a runaway bestseller. For his second book Butcher chose to travel to Sierra Leone and Liberia, this time following the trail of the great writer Graham Greene who travelled there in the 1930s.

Chasing the Devil is an equally enthralling book. Butcher is an immensely skilled writer, effortlessly segueing between travelogue and history, political context and vivid descriptions of the terrain. He is a genial man, faintly laconic and acutely perceptive, and is an honest witness. He pulls himself up short if he feels he’s taking too Western a view; he readily admits to being petrified at times, exhausted and disorientated. In a trade known for its arrogance, he’s also tremendously empathetic to the people he meets and to his travelling companions.

There is menace here, too, mostly from the secret society that keeps these countries in its grip, the “Poro”, and its chilling manifestations of devils and sorcery. There are cannibals abroad, and “heartmen” who will rip out and eat your still-beating heart, as well as the ever-present danger of unspeakable diseases like Lassa fever. Most affecting, though, is Butcher’s contemplation of the wake left by vicious wars: the broken, the maimed, the starving. Dereliction and poverty abound, and there is a sense of the jungle creeping back, slowly undoing any hard-won progress.

As with Blood River, one could weep for the wasted potential. In Liberia and Sierra Leone, he writes, “While the spirit to survive is strong, the spirit to thrive is not.” He points out how Africans thrive in the diaspora away from the stranglehold of taboo and tradition, of hierarchy and collectiveness. He quotes research that shows that Africans living abroad each year send more money back to their families than foreign companies invest in the entire continent.

Butcher’s reporting of runaway corruption and bribery should strike a loud note of worry for South African readers, but for me the concept of “spirit to thrive” is vitally important.

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• Chasing the Devil: The Search for Africa’s Fighting Spirit by Tim Butcher
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