If you're into white trash noir Freedom's Child by Jax Miller (Harper Collins) R285A foul-mouthed tattooed drunk with a nose for trouble, Freedom Oliver works in a small-town biker bar and is haunted by the mistakes of her earlier life. She misses her children, whom she put up for adoption when she went into witness protection after killing her evil cop husband 20 years earlier. Then she learns her daughter is missing, possibly kidnapped, so she breaks cover to find her, and soon her savage in-laws are heading her way, hell-bent on revenge. A ferocious, witty and tough-as-nails debut.The issueOn Thursday we mark the 70th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in the dying moments of World War 2. It was a weapon so terrible that its mushroom cloud - "a vivid symbol," according to Andrew Anthony in the Observer, "of Promethean hubris, of technology's grim and uncontrollable potential" - continues to cast a shadow over our age.And it's there whenever Armageddon threatens. The journalist John Hersey put it this way: "What has kept the world safe from the bomb since 1945 has not been deterrence, in the sense of fear of specific weapons, so much as it's been memory. The memory of what happened at Hiroshima."Hersey was among the first Westerners to report on the bomb's aftermath, and his magnificent 1946 New Yorker feature, in which he closely profiled the lives of a few survivors, did much to give the carnage a human perspective. It was later published as a slim best-selling book titled Hiroshima. In 1999 it was judged to be the single finest piece of American reporting of the 20th century by a panel selected by New York University's journalism department, and is often cited as a founding text of the New Journalism. This month it's being republished by Penguin in a commemorative issue along with journalist Eric Schlosser's Gods of Metal, which details the break-in by Catholic pacifists at a Tennessee nuclear weapons facility in 2012. Both should retail for about R50 or less.And, speaking of Catholics, the bomb unleashed on Nagasaki, just three days after Hiroshima, was dropped almost directly above the largest Catholic church in Asia. This second, perhaps less familiar attack is chronicled in Susan Southard's new work, Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War (Viking), a harrowing account of what it was like for those who were unlucky enough to not have been killed instantly in that white flash of intense heat. Like Hersey, Southard concentrates on individuals - and gives America's subsequent Cold War evasions and hypocrisy suitably short shrift.Bottom line"There are a number of people with whom I still mean to break bread, share a glass and beg their pardon, for the betrayal and any harm I have caused." - Agent 407: A South African Spy Breaks Her Silence by Olivia Forsyth (Jonathan Ball Publishers)..