Peter Cleary: 10 books

This new novel by Cleary is a crime thriller which vividly exposes some of the security and social problems in the new South Africa. Ethan Hart loses his wife and young son in a hijack which goes horribly wrong at their smallholding in Halfway House. He becomes torn by the often conflicting demands...

"You’ve brought death to our farm." The accusation haunts him. They are spoken by the youngest daughter of popular farm owners, Peter and Helen Bausch, who are callously murdered in the bedroom of the family home. His presence on a cottage on their farm triggered the murder, planned in...

Adam Geard is only 8-years old when he witnesses a brutal rape and murder by the notorious Red Brigade on his parents’ farm on the Khami River near the Zimbabwean town of Bulawayo. The victims of the ethnic cleansing are their farm foreman, his wife and two young children. For decades Adam has had...

“The people will cry when they see their sacred lands being eaten by the river.” The heartland of the Himba people is threatened by the proposal to build a hydro-electric dam on the Kunene River. Adam Geard is hired by Rivers for Life to lobby for a less damaging solution to Namibia’s power...

This novel is a sequel to Chameleon Mountain. Two generations later, Falk Baartman is born in Die Hel. He attends school in Oudtshoorn and represents SWD in the first ever Craven Week. Later he starts a business in Prince Albert for artists and writers. There, a jealous rival objects to his race classification...

He was a rising star, credited with the success of a major coup in the market, but there was a deeply hidden flaw – a shameful family secret – and when it surfaced his achievements crumbled, dissolving his fragile self-worth. * * * * * The context of this novel is the fiercely competitive South...

War raged in the eastern territories of South Africa for nearly one hundred years. The wars were not continuous, nor were they single-faceted in instigator or causal factors, although issues of power or land were at the heart of all of them. Into that conflagration came the Belmont family: a simple...

Chameleon Mountain follows the fortunes of several generations of the Baartman family from the mid-18th century into the 20th century. It is a unique family, formed from the genes of a Khoikhoi woman and a Dutch settler. The characters are as intriguing as the Swartberg Mountains which foster them....

“YET ANOTHER SEMI-FICTI0NAL MASTERPIECE.” Dave Savides – A Family Affair On the Warm Shores of Africa continues the annals of the Allison family, first encountered in A Family Affair. Jake, the lawman turned dark avenger. Abby, whose passion for another child transcends society norms. Kirk,...

The battle of iSandlwana in 1879 was the worst defeat suffered by a British army in the colonies. The names of some of the combatants resound even today in the chronicles of the Victorian era. One of them was Colonel Anthony Durnford, Irish-born Royal Engineer, an enigmatic man both loved and maligned,...