Mind-bending world of the apartheid military

If you read one book this week

Kill Yourself & Count to 10 by Gordon Torr (Penguin) R220

Torr's rage-filled roman à clef is based on his own experiences at the notorious Greefswald camp. Here SADF conscript Lloyd Norton finds himself flung helter-skelter into a brutal rehabilitation programme run by a rogue psychiatrist trying to "cure" young servicemen of their "unsuitability" for military service. This is a work of major importance, and quite unforgettable.

The issue

There's considerable anger directed at Booker-winning Hilary Mantel following the publication in The Guardian and The New York Times at the weekend of her short story, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher. The story - also in a forthcoming anthology - is about a well-to-do woman who allows an IRA marksman into her flat to murder the prime minister in 1983. Prominent Tories have slammed the story as offensive and in poor taste. Comments on The Guardian website were mostly critical. "You sad, sick cowardly woman," said one reader. "What a dreadful thing to write about any dead person." Mantel told the newspaper: "As a citizen I suffered from her but, as a writer, I benefited."

Crash course

Stephen Fry, once described as the stupid person's idea of a clever person, has written a third autobiography, More Fool Me (Penguin), out this week, and has drawn attention to the potential disasters of such an undertaking. "The very idea of a person who isn't a field marshal or former president writing a third volume of autobiography might seem more than a little hubristic," he wrote in the London Sunday Times, "but this person does have more to tell, they really do."

But therein lay a problem. Fry admitted the book's subject matter - rampant cocaine abuse - was overtraded. But, he added, it was not "an unacceptably weaselly and greasy plea for understanding . It is meant to tell the story of a foolish period in the life of an often very foolish man." He also suggested his "honesty" would attract the unwelcome attention of certain columnists who would be told "to slime over me". Not that he minded. "To be hated by the hateful is one of the great achievements in life."

Interestingly, one of the columnists Fry mentioned was Julie Burchill, who has a new book, Unchosen: The Memoirs of a Philo-Semite (Unbound) out next month. It details her love for the Jews - and how she abandoned her plans to convert because of a local rabbi's tolerance of Islam. "How could Islam be as good a religion as Judaism?" fumed Burchill.

The bottom line

"It's the fake femininity I can't stand, and the counterfeit voice . It's her lack of pity. Why does she need an eye operation? Is it because she can't cry?" - The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher by Hilary Mantel (Fourth Estate)