PAGECAST

Welcome to day 1 of the Pagecast Holiday Round-up.

Sonny Bill Williams (SBW) is a once in a hundred-year athlete with immense sporting talent. He has been a national and international champion across Rugby Union, Rugby League and Boxing. Williams began his career in Rugby League, and has played in the Australian NRL with the Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs and the Sydney Roosters. He has played for the Toronto Wolfpack in Super League and has played Rugby Union for Toulon in France, Canterbury, Counties Manukau, the Crusaders, the Chiefs and the Blues in New Zealand and the Panasonic Wild Knights in Japan. He has won 58 caps for the New Zealand All Blacks and was a member of the teams that won the 2011 and 2015 Rugby Union World Cups. He has also played Rugby Sevens for New Zealand, competing in the 2015-16 World Rugby Sevens Series and the 2016 Olympics. Williams has boxed professionally seven times, winning all of his heavyweight bouts. He was the New Zealand Professional Boxing Association (NZPBA) Heavyweight Champion and World Boxing Association (WBA) International Heavyweight Champion. Away from sport, Sonny Bill Williams focuses on his family, his Islamic faith and is very involved in charity work and promoting social justice.

Co-produced by Ingrid Klückow and Nicola Bruns. A special thanks to Boomhuis studios for the studio time and technical support.

Best Selling author Robin Sharma discusses his latest book, “The Everyday Hero Manifesto,” with Bongani Bingwa, host of the Breakfast show on 702.

For over twenty-five years, leadership legend and personal mastery trailblazer Robin Sharma has mentored billionaires, business titans, professional sports superstars and entertainment royalty via a revolutionary methodology that has caused them to accomplish rare-air results. Now, in this groundbreaking book, he makes this transformational system available to anyone ready for undefeatable positivity, monumental productivity, profound spiritual freedom and a life of helpfulness to many.

In The Everyday Hero Manifesto, you will discover:

- The hidden habits used by many of the world’s most creative and successful people to realize their visionary ambitions

- Original techniques to turn fear into fuel, problems into power and past troubles into triumphs

- A breakthrough blueprint to battle-proof yourself against distraction and procrastination so that you produce the magic that dominates your domain

- Pioneering insights on installing world-class routines, including rising early, achieving superhuman fitness and becoming the most disciplined person you know

- Unusual wisdom knowledge to operate with far more simplicity, beauty and peace

- A part memoir on a life richly lived, part instruction manual for virtuoso-grade performance and part handbook for spiritual freedom in an age of high-velocity change, The Everyday Hero Manifesto will completely transform your life. Forever.

Death is a fact of life, but the experience of grief is unique to each of us. This poignant and thought-provoking anthology gives us portraits of grief as seen through the eyes of writers and poets.

The contributions range from the deeply personal: a poet chronicles her relationship with her troubled, abusive father, a World War II survivor – to the political: an investigator from the Missing Persons Task Team draws us into the ongoing search for the remains of activists who were murdered by the apartheid state between 1960 and 1994 – to the philosophical: a writer ponders the ethics of killing small animals.

Perhaps grief never truly ends but these stories transform the pain of death into something beautiful so that we can find ways to live with loss.

Featuring contributions by Sisonke Msimang, Mary Watson, Karin Schimke, Hedley Twiddle, Ishtiyaq Shukri, Dawn Garisch, Shubnum Khan, Malika Ndlovu, Toni Stuart, Stacy Hardy and more.

Producers of Pagecast, Nicola Bruns and Ingrid Klückow, chat with debut author Sara Nisha Adams regarding her novel, The Reading List.

A new chapter is just beginning…

‘The story is an absolute joy… A captivating and exquisitely crafted debut’ Sunday Times bestseller, Heidi Swain

‘Absolutely captures the magic of reading and libraries’ Louise Hare When Aleisha discovers a crumpled reading list tucked into a tattered library book, it sparks an extraordinary journey.

From timeless stories of love and friendship to an epic journey across the Pacific Ocean with a boy and a tiger in a boat, the list opens a gateway to new and beautiful worlds – just when Aleisha needs an escape from her troubles at home.

And when widower Mukesh arrives at the library, desperate to connect with his bookworm granddaughter, Aleisha introduces him to the magic of the reading list. An anxious teenager and a lonely grandfather formed an unlikely book club of two.

Inspiring and heartwarming, The Reading List is a love letter to storytelling – its power to transport us, connect us, and remind us that a new beginning is only a page away…

A real heart-lifter… A joyful, uplifting read’ Good Housekeeping

‘A gorgeous debut novel about the power reading has to bring people together, no matter the barriers of age, culture and class’ Red.

Jeffery is in conversation with Danielle Weakley, Ed-in-Chief Modern Living and crime thriller junkie.

The "master of ticking-bomb suspense" Jeffery Deaver brings us the latest thriller featuring his most beloved protagonists. Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs are back – on the hunt for a criminal terrorising New York City

A killer without limits

He comes into your home at night. He watches you as you sleep. He waits.

A city in turmoil

He calls himself ‘The Locksmith’. No door can keep him out. No security system can catch him. And now he’s about to kill.

A race against time to stop him

Nobody in New York is safe. Now it’s up to Lincoln Rhyme to untangle the web of evidence and catch him.

But with Lincoln under investigation himself, and tension in the city at boiling point, time is running out…

‘If Steve Biko were alive today, we would have a country that gladly embraces African culture as the dominant driving force for how society is organised ...’

In 1968, two young medical students, Steve Biko and Mamphela Ramphele, fell in love while dreaming of a life free from oppression and racial discrimination. Their love story is also the story of the founding of the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) by a group of 15 principled and ambitious students at the University of Natal in Durban in the early 1970s.

In this deeply personal book, Hlumelo Biko, who was born of Steve and Mamphela’s union, movingly recounts his parents’ love story and how the BCM’s message of black self-love and self-reliance helped to change the course of South African history.

Based on interviews with some of the BCM’s founding members, Black Consciousness describes the early years of the movement in vivid detail and sets out its guiding principles around a positive black identity, black theology and the practice of Ubuntu through community-based programmes.

In spiritual conversation with his father, Hlumelo re-examines what it takes to live a Black Consciousness life in today’s South Africa. He also explains why he believes his father – who was brutally murdered by the apartheid police in 1977 – would have supported true radical economic transformation if he were alive today.

Did you know SA Cricketer, AB de Villiers and widely loved author - Jeffrey Archer, are good friends?

Pagecast's Nicola Bruns and Ingrid Kluckow chat with de Villiers and Archer regarding how they met, their aspirations and Archer's new book Over My Dead Body.

Jeffrey Archer, whose novels include the Clifton Chronicles, the William Warwick novels and Kane and Abel, has topped bestseller lists worldwide, with sales of over 275 million copies. He is the only author ever to have been a #1 bestseller in fiction, short stories and non-fiction (The Prison Diaries). A member of the House of Lords for over a quarter of a century, the author is married to Dame Mary Archer, and they have two sons, two granddaughters and two grandsons.

Investigative journalist Devi Sankaree Govender is talking with crime writer Deon Meyer regarding his latest novel Dark Flood.

'The undisputed champion of South African crime' - Wilbur Smith

One last chance. Almost fired for insubordination, detectives Benny Griessel and Vaughn Cupido find themselves demoted, exiled from the elite Hawks unit and dispatched to the leafy streets of Stellenbosch. Working a missing person report on student Callie de Bruin is not the level of work they are used to, but it's all they get. And soon, it takes a dangerous, alarming turn.

One last chance. Stellenbosch is beautiful, but one man has ruined its economy. When estate agent Sandra Steenberg desperately needs a big sale, Jasper Boonstra and his gigantic corporate fraud have crashed the local property market. Bringing up twins and supporting her academic husband, she is facing disaster. Then she gets a call from Jasper Boonstra, fraudster, sexual predator and owner of a superb property worth millions, even now.

For Sandra, the stakes are high and about to get way higher.

For Benny Griessel, clinging to sobriety and the relationship that saved his life, the truth about Callie can only lead to more trouble.

Taut with intrigue, murder and suspense, exploding with action and excitement, The Dark Flood is a masterpiece from the author of Trackers and The Last Hunt.

'One of the best crime writers on the planet' - Daily Mail. www.jonathanball.co.za

Released every Monday at 7 am, Pagecast Season 1 offers you insider interviews with recently published authors and their latest books. We look into the process of writing these books, explore the narratives within and provide you with the story behind the story.