Windows on the words

The winners of the Sunday times Fiction Prize and the Alan Paton Award will be announced on Saturday. We asked each of the shortlisted authors to choose an extract

Book of War by James Whyle (Jacana Media)

Down below the cave the irregulars sat around the Captain's vat which balanced on rocks in the fire and they drank Cape Smoke from their water bottles and chewed on beef which was tough but succulent and nicely roasted on the joiner's rotisserie.

Higgs and Basson put their names down, said Evans. They told them they'd get farms as soon as the war was over.

Where?

On the Big Fat. Up on the edge of the mountains where there's water. And good wood to build with.

The joiner looked at Higgs.

This true?

They put us on the list, said Higgs. There's going to be English villages all over the place.

And schools, said Basson. And heathens to do the digging.

You better get women, said the joiner. Because heathen men don't dig.

What do they do?

Admire their cattle. And fight. Like Dutchmen.

The men sat there in a circle and stared at the flames which danced about the sooty copper surface of the vat.

I'm going to apply, said Evans. Albert Evans. Esquire. Land owner.

The joiner spat.

Take me a little Dutch girl for a wife.

She'll be in trouble, said Higgs.

Entanglement by Steven Boykey Sidley (Picador Africa)

Jared and Ryan have been friends for over a decade, having bonded at some talkfest around science and the arts when Ryan was a freshly minted novelist and Jared was being touted as the next big thing in physics.

Ryan, with whom he shared a panel on some pretentious subject he can no longer recall, was, unsurprisingly, hung-over, combative and obstreperous. Jared was more earnest, prepared to give the subject deliberation, and to deliver some value to the paying delegates. Ryan decided to go into insult mode, and tore into everything that Jared said. It was terrifically entertaining for the audience, but Jared found himself increasingly irritated at Ryan's grandstanding. After the panel, Jared went up to him.

"Did you enjoy that?" Jared asked.

"More than you, apparently," said Ryan with an impish grin.

"You're a prick, you know that?"

"Yeah, I know. Let's go to the cafeteria and pick up some groupies."

And so they did, or at least Ryan did. Jared sat drinking a beer and observing with disbelief as Ryan went at it, collaring pretty delegates, waitresses, speakers, anyone really. He charmed, cajoled, flirted, berated and argued his way to a successful assignation somewhere in the building, returning to Jared after 15 minutes' absence, with a yawn.

"I'm starving, let's go downtown for Chinese."

Jared couldn't help but like him.

For the Mercy of Water by Karen Jayes (Penguin Books)

He had told me about the guard and about Mother because he knew that I needed this knowledge to fulfil another story. He understood this need in me, and he trusted it . despite the risk to himself.

By doing this, he had moved us both closer to the realm of those who live small but vital lives, who live not for the rewards prescribed and distributed by the powerful, but for the tiny glances of light that come to them, and very personally to them, and that far outweigh any material prize.

I stopped walking. I put my hand on my chest. I stood there on the side of the road where the wealthy people lived in houses where I would not go, and I felt warm and comfortable and still, as if I'd just inhaled a shaft of sunshine.

I thought of the guard, and the sunlight in the cave that had come in and given Eve those few moments to strike him, to fight back.

I understood then that, despite all the evil that spirals through us and around us, despite all our corrupt needs and terrible acts, there is a single flame that comes sometimes if we are ready to see it. It travels very fast, like an arrow, and it burns right through us, through that dark funnel that encloses us and spins us and holds us in one spot always - and it slices right to the centre, and it explodes it all.

The Institute for Taxi Poetry by Imraan Coovadia (Umuzi)

I happen to be a taxi poet - a former taxi poet according to some - in a city run by Croatian disco men from Zagreb and Malay gangsters from Pinelands, by publicity girls wearing long earrings, by dollar millionaires with business connections to the ruling Congress Party, by old Trotskyites and Bukharinites, and by cabinet ministers and dictators from elsewhere who reside along the Atlantic seaboard or on the wine estates inland.

Solly Greenfields - who had once been a taxi poet, and then a Buddhist, once a Muslim, once a Jew, once a lowly cook in a grease-sprayed apron in the room-service kitchen of the Mount Nelson, on other occasions a guest in the very same hotel - wasn't the first to go.

If he happened to be the last then it was only because the world was about to end.

Was there a pattern?

I wasn't sure.

There wasn't necessarily a plan to bump off taxi poets.

In Cape Town nobody had a plan.

We made arrangements one day at a time because the day after tomorrow was impossible to predict.

It wasn't certain there would be such a day.

So what can I tell you?

So there happened to be a lot of lead flying around.

The Unlikely Genius of Dr Cuthbert Kambazuma by Chris Wadman (Jonathan Ball Publishers)

Yet another cacophony of cackles and sniggers consumed the courtroom, packed as it was with podgy pressmen from The Herald and a handful of Zanu-PF little-wigs.

"My Lord, I implore you! No, I go so far as to beg of you, my Lord, to see the facts for what they are!" pleaded Scotsman Mandikuvadza, his hands raised in supplication.

"It is common cause, my Lord, that my client, the Movement for Democratic Change, had yesterday morning filed its own urgent application for the release of its members who have been detained at the Pariwenyatwa Hospital. The application before this court today was brought by the Ministry of Health only this morning. It is clear to all, my Lord, that the purpose of today's application is purely to frustrate the application filed yesterday, and to hold these so-called patients purely for political gain. To grant the applicant's Order under such dubious circumstances would constitute a perversion of justice . in the extreme, my Lord!"

The Honourable Justice Vuroyi's mouth broadened into a smirk as he adjusted the fluffy grey wig that perched on his head like a rooster on its post.

"Mister Mandikuvadza, we have all heard the evidence, we have all seen the pictures, what more can I do! Nyaya iyi haisi Catch-22! What am I supposed to do about it? Counsel for the applicant has asked for an Ex Parte Order extending the period during which psychiatric evaluation of the patients may be undertaken, from seven days to ninety days. I see no reason to withhold such an Order. The law on this point is clear."

The battle was clearly over, and Scotsman Mandikuvadza knew it all too well.

Rat Roads by Jacques Pauw (Zebra Press)

THE rebels fleetingly scan one another. Some look away, their eyes drifting across the valley. One or two step back, almost disassociating themselves from the chore at hand. Kennedy is standing at the front of the group, still clasping his LMG.

The baby bawls. The woman stops screaming, her terror-stricken face etched with the knowledge of her fate. Nobody is taking prisoners.

The executioner lifts his AK. A single shot rings out. The woman's lifeless body plummets to the ground. As the echo of the gunshot floats down the valley and dissipates over the furthest hill, the air fills with the squall of the baby. The bullet has slid through the mother's body but not even grazed the tot.

It is almost exactly seventeen years later, and in my dining room in Johannesburg, Kennedy holds his head in his hands. It is raining - one of the last showers of the summer - and for some time, the only sounds are the drops lashing the old tin roof and his soft whimpers. I study the sobbing man. My initial disgust gives way to pity. After so many years, the big man has let go of a tormenting secret. I want to get up and put my arms around him and comfort him, but I let him grieve in silence.

Killing for Profit by Julian Rademeyer (Zebra Press)

In the Michelangelo Hotel, Johnny puts down his cup. His voice is hushed. In the background a man is fiddling with the lounge's TV set. There is a rugby game on.

By mid-2010, the Thais were actively refocusing their efforts on the acquisition of "bamboo", the term they use to refer to rhino horn.

And, they believed, they had found a loophole in the hunting laws that would give them access to an unlimited supply.

The regulations are clear: a hunter can hunt only one rhino a year. But there is no national or centralised permitting system. Efforts to centralise this data has resulted in little more than an Excel spreadsheet, rife with spelling mistakes and errors. Part of the problem is that each province approves and issues its own permits in accordance with provincial wildlife ordinances, which can differ widely from province to province. Where there is a will, there is a way, and the permitting officials who vet the hunters and check their credentials prove all too easy to manipulate and corrupt.

Chai is "very clever", Johnny says.

"He told me that he's been in the wildlife trade for twenty-two years and has done everything from horn to ivory and bones. He is brilliant. If he looks at the horns on a living rhino, he can estimate their weight exactly. For instance, let's say he'd estimate it at about 5.3kg. When the rhino is later shot and the horns taken off, he'll only have been about point five of a kilo-gram out. He's that accurate."

Johnny put out feelers and found a hunting outfitter. Juan Pace is the owner of Shangwari Safaris, a business established in 1996. Its website boasts that it operates in six African countries and "specialises only in dangerous game hunting". Pace is also a member of PHASA. The Thais said they had heard that Thai citizens could not legally hunt rhinos. Pace said he'd check. The word came back to them: "It doesn't matter what country you're from, you can shoot."

Biko: A Biography by Xolela Mangcu (Tafelberg)

The principal at Charles Morgan Primary, Mr Mboni, had a tendency to typecast students, says Sonwabo Yengo, one of Steve's best friends in Ginsberg. For example, Fikile Mlinda - who would later become one of Steve's close comrades - was always late for school. This was partly because he came from one of the poorer families in the Tsolo section. His family made their living by brewing traditional beer and Fikile had to go to town to buy the ingredients before he could come to school.

He was invariably late, and Mboni would bellow: "Ah, Mlinda my boy, you will always be late in life."

To another student, Boy Mgubelo, who was a caddy, Mboni would say: "Ah, Mgubelo, uyakuhlala uyingxungxu okokoko - you will not amount to anything, boy." And then Yengo remembers that one day as they were working in the school garden, Mboni shouted to Steve: "Ah, Biko, uyakuba yinkokheli mfana! - you will grow up to be a leader, my boy!"

Yengo does not recall what occasioned Mboni to say this. But looking back, Yengo says he could see Steve's leadership qualities among his peers. Indeed, while [his brother] Khaya's efforts went into political proselytising, Steve put his energies into helping other kids. Major Sihunu, who later became a successful businessman, credited Steve for helping him get the highly sought-after Standard Six certificate.

The Last Afrikaner Leaders a Supreme Test of Power by Hermann Giliomee (Tafelberg)

By 1994, both the National Party and the ANC had come to regard the 1987 Dakar conference of a group of "internal" South Africans and a group of ANC leaders who were in exile as an insignificant milestone in South Africa's journey to an inclusive democracy.

Van Zyl Slabbert now found himself, as he put it, on the "other side of history".

History, as the ANC wrote it, had indeed passed him by. But Slabbert did become a symbol in a way he did not expect. A new generation of Afrikaners respected him as one of the first Afrikaner intellectuals to renounce apartheid unequivocally.

Slabbert was comfortable in his skin as an Afrikaner. He actively guided and supported Aardklop, an Afrikaans cultural festival in Potchefstroom, and spoke up for retaining Afrikaans as the main medium of instruction at the University of Stellenbosch. He was the first to dare to take a large group of Afrikaners to speak to the ANC in exile.

The government did not consider it helpful but, as a symbolic act, it gave hope to millions of South Africans who laboured under the yoke of apartheid.

As a politician there were, in fact, two Slabberts. One is an icon in the mould of John F Kennedy. The similarities are striking: the charm and charisma, the warmth, the self-deprecating humour, the intelligence and the ambition. Throughout Slabbert's life there was an element of impetuousness - almost recklessness - that was epitomised by his dramatic act in 1986 of sacrificing his entire political base in the hope of returning to politics in the new system on which he was prepared to stake all. The other Slabbert is the sombre, even sad, figure of his final years. He saw the end of apartheid, for which he had worked, and knocked at the door of the new dispensation to help build the new order. But the ANC did not invite him in.

Endings and Beginnings by Redi Tlhabi (Jacana Media)

I'm standing at the street corner and, for the second time in my short life, looking down on a dead body. I mustn't go crazy this time. There's blood coming out of his mouth, just like with Papa two years ago. But unlike Papa, his eye isn't hanging out of its socket. It still looks weird though, like he's winking at me. Papa also winked at me. A gentle spring rain is washing the blood from Mabegzo's face. His family aren't here yet. I'm the only one here who cares about him, and I'm powerless to fend off the human vultures circling his body, eager to kill him again and again. Silently I whisper the Catholic prayer for the dead.

"Moya wa hae, le bohle ba falletseng, e phomole ka kgotso ka mohau wa Modimo. May his soul and all of the departed rest in peace, in God's mercy. Let it be." I say it three times, just as our priest does, hoping he won't be in pain for long.

Since my father died two years ago, I've often wondered whether my prayers helped him survive in purgatory, and if he's still there. The nuns who taught Sunday school made purgatory sound horrific, a place where people cry and scream in preparation for heaven. But if anyone could survive it, Papa could. He was big and strong and never cried, so I knew that this place of suffering wouldn't break my father. I knew it.

2013 FACT FILE

SUNDAY TIMES FICTION PRIZE

• The judges are Michele Magwood, Sarah Nuttall and Andries Oliphant
• The five shortlisted novels were chosen from an initial longlist of 31 novels
• Michiel Heyns won the prize for 'Lost Ground' in 2012
• The winner will receive R75000

ALAN PATON AWARD

• The judges are Peter Harris, Prishani Naidoo and Ben Williams
• The five shortlisted books were chosen from an initial longlist of 42 books
• Last year Hugh Lewin won the prize for 'Stones Against the Mirror'
• The winner will receive R75000
•  

The winners will be announced at an awards ceremony on June 29