I’m delighted to share my review for Kalahari Passage by Candi Miller #histfic #blogtour #bookreview

Here’s the blurb

Koba and Mannie have been in jail. Their crime, loving each other across the Apartheid colour bar in southern Africa. Koba escapes her captors and using her bush skills, finds her way across the semi-desert to her former tribal home. But adapting to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle after a decade away, has challenges. And her mortal enemy is on her trail.

Meanwhile Mannie absconds during his parole and sets off on a sub-continental road trip to find his beloved Koba. But will his new comrades persuade him to join them across the border for training in deadly guerrilla warfare? And what will that mean for his future with Koba?  

Under tragic circumstances the lovers meet, but the danger they are in means they face heart-breaking choices. 

Kalahari Passage is an action-packed story of a search for identity and love. Readers will be spellbound by Koba’s world where an ancient culture dances, trances and lives in harmony with the land.

Key ideas

●     Unique FMC from world’s oldest living culture, largely unknown outside anthropology. The lineage of Koba’s people goes back to the dawn of humankind. 

●     Dispossession – ancestral land, cultural identity, freedom

●     Interracial love – romantic and family  

●     Racial discrimination and defiance

●     Recent black history – Apartheid South Africa 1960s

Purchase Links

Kalahari Passage: https://mybook.to/7qAtkQA

Koba series:  https://mybook.to/T81RWsf

My Review

Kalahari Passage is the second book in the Koba books. I confess, I was a little perplexed to begin with. But, I took myself into another room, and just sat and read, and I’m so pleased I did (perhaps, my friends, start with the first book). It is a beautiful book, telling the story of people caught up in events they have little control over. It describes a time we should still be horrified to read about, yet it accurately reflects the beliefs of people at that time. It is a richly imagined and intricately recreated world that most of us in the Western world would fail to understand and comprehend, but we should.

The story is both complex and straightforward – will our divided lovers ever meet again, or will people, events and politics play their part in keeping them apart, as well as societal constraints? But all that pales into insignificance as we journey into the Kalahari with Koba. You can taste the sand, feel the heat and grow very thirsty reading this story.

While half of the cast are worrying about being overheard saying something they shouldn’t on ‘party telephone lines’, the other half are simply trying to find drinking water and enough food to eat. The contrast is stark, but essentially, concerns surviving in a harsh world where politics or the environment could see you in a great deal of trouble.

I loved this book. It opened my eyes, it made me think, and it taught me about a past I know very little about. Go read it.

Meet the author

Candi Miller was born in southern Africa and has spent more than twenty years researching the first peoples of the region, a group who have now adopted the exonym of San or Bushmen. She taught creative writing at UK universities. She now lives in Cornwall where she is writing the last book of the Koba trilogy. She is republishing her novels to support a school feeding scheme she co-founded for San children in 2017. 

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