Wings over our hearts

If you read one book this week

Second Life by SJ Watson (Doubleday) R25

Watson scored a huge commercial hit with his debut, Before I Go To Sleep, a gripping thriller centred on a woman who loses her memory every time she falls asleep. (Was that stranger in bed with her really her husband?) It was a difficult act to follow, but he acquits himself admirably here with this mystery which trawls through the darker reaches of internet relationships as a woman with addictive tendencies searches the streets of Paris for her sister's killer. Edgy, disturbing stuff.

The issue

Sighs of relief last week among estate agents with multimillion-rand Atlantic seaboard properties in their portfolios as President Jacob Zuma explained that foreigners could own property here, after all, just not farms.

The debate over land reform remains highly polarised, though, and new challenges confront lawmakers: climate change, threats to bio-diversity, urbanisation, high unemployment, food security and global economic uncertainties. There couldn't be a more timely contribution to the issue than Land Divided, Land Restored: Land Reform for South Africa in the 21st Century (Jacana), edited by Cherryl Walker and Ben Cousins. The book is illustrated with photographs from the Iziko National Gallery exhibition, Umhlaba 1913-2013: Commemorating the 1913 Land Act, curated by David Goldblatt, Paul Weinberg, Bongi Dhlomo-Mautloa and Pam Warne.

Crash course

Helen Macdonald's world fell apart when her father, a newspaper photographer, dropped dead on a London street. In her 30s, with no home, no partner, no children, she turned - in her grief - to falconry and working with a goshawk, a bird she has described in H is for Hawk (Vintage), an extraordinary account of this period in her life, as being famously "difficult to tame, sulky, fractious and foreign". Of her bird, Mabel, she wrote: "The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief and numb to the hurts of human life."

The book has been hailed on both sides of the Atlantic as a masterpiece of nature writing. In the UK, it has picked up the Costa Book of the Year award and the Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction. Writing in the London Sunday Times, John Carey said: "What [Macdonald] has achieved is a very rare thing in literature - a completely realistic account of a human relationship with animal consciousness." Dwight Garner wrote in the New York Times: "Her book is so good that, at times, it hurt me to read it. It draws blood in ways that seem curative."

The bottom line

"Soldiers are ultimately vessels and vassals of the state, and they do not go to war of their own accord, so why shouldn't the state or the community help relieve them of their guilt when they return home?" - The Evil Hours: A Biography of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder by David J Morris (Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)