Penguin SA to publish Sally Andrew’s Tannie Maria cookbook

Sally Andrew, creator of the inimitable Tannie Maria, will publish her first cookbook with Penguin Random House South Africa (PRHSA) in May 2024. RECIPES TO DIE LIVE FOR features recipes from Sally Andrew’s first four murder mystery novels, as well as some tantalising new additions.

RECIPES TO DIE LIVE FOR is not only a celebration of Tannie Maria's delectable recipes but of her philosophy, of South Africa’s Karoo region and of life itself, Andrew explains. ‘I am so excited about RECIPES TO DIE LIVE FOR. It is the most beautiful book I have ever seen. The food styling, the design and the photographs are spectacular.’

The cookbook is a collection of the recipes Tannie Maria (the unforgettable agony aunt with a knack for righting wrongs with a recipe) has shared with readers in her column in the Klein Karoo Gazette. In the four novels – RECIPES FOR LOVE AND MURDER, TANNIE MARIA AND THE SATANIC MECHANIC, DEATH ON THE LIMPOPO and THE MILK TART MURDERS – Tannie Maria has won hearts and whetted appetites with mouth-watering creations, including the famous Venus Cake, Muesli Buttermilk Rusks and even Spekboom Ice Cream.

PRHSA’s Lifestyle Publisher, Beverley Dodd, says: ‘Spiced with enjoyable sayings from the four novels and seasoned with photographs of the food and the beautiful Karoo, RECIPES TO DIE LIVE FOR is as warm and witty as Tannie Maria herself, guaranteed to delight fans and newcomers to the series.’

The book showcases more than 80 recipes, including vegetarian and vegan options. Many of the dishes are slow foods and traditional South African recipes, but there are also quick meals and new inventions. Whether you are craving a Karoo lamb pie or a vetkoek with mince, or are lus for a melktert or koeksister, you will find it among Tannie Maria’s gastronomic delights. As Sally sums it up so succinctly: ‘Enjoy cooking. Enjoy eating. Enjoy life. Why not?’

The Tannie Maria book series titles are all bestsellers in South Africa – regularly in the Top 5, with THE MILK TART MURDERS shooting straight to the top of the combined fiction and non-fiction charts on publication in March 2022. It also won the 2023 Nielsen SA Book Award for Fiction.

The first in the series, RECIPES FOR LOVE AND MURDER, was recently adapted for television to great acclaim. Acorn TV hold distribution rights to the series for the US, Canada, UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand, while Multichoice holds rights for Africa. Following the pick-up by Japan’s Mystery Channel, the first season has now sold in 94 countries. A second series was recently announced, and is due to start filming in April 2024.

Sally is currently working on the next instalment in the Tannie Maria series, with more details to be announced soon.  

 

About Sally Andrew

Sally Andrew is the best-selling author of the Tannie Maria Mysteries series. She lives in a mud-brick house on a nature reserve in the Klein Karoo with her artist partner, a giant eland, and a secretive leopard. She also spends time in the wilderness of southern Africa and the seaside suburb of Muizenberg. She has a Master’s in Adult Education from the University of Cape Town. Before settling down to write full time, she was a social and environmental activist.

Her first novel, RECIPES FOR LOVE & MURDER: A Tannie Maria Mystery was a Kirkus Best Book of 2015, A Wall Street Journal Best Mystery Book 2015, The Bookseller Fiction editor’s Choice 2015 and A Good Housekeeping Book of the Month.

Her work has been translated into thirteen languages.

 

Praise for the Tannie Maria series

‘Vivid, amusing and immensely enjoyable… A triumph.’ – Alexander McCall Smith

‘Take a pinch of Alexander McCall Smith, a dash of Diane Mott Davidson, and add a smidge of the wild veld and you’ll get a taste for this lekker story (that’s “delicious” in Afrikaans). While the tone is heartfelt, Andrew doesn’t shy away from the realities of spousal abuse or the shadow of South Africa’s tumultuous history. With a fascinating setting, engaging characters, and a full complement of drool-worthy recipes, this is sure to leave readers craving more.’ – Library Journal, starred review

‘An intriguing mystery in an exotic locale, a work of enormous charm.’ – Wall Street Journal

‘A delightful debut, tender and funny. The mystery takes on the worldwide problem of abused women while revealing both the beauties and problems of South Africa. And the recipes will make you want to drop everything and start cooking.’ – Kirkus, starred review

‘Utterly delicious, to the very last morsel.’ – Deon Meyer

‘Chock full of good food and interesting characters.’ – Kerry Greenwood, author of the PHRYNE FISHER and CORINNA CHAPMAN series

 

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Peter James wins at Nielsen BookData Bestseller Awards

Photo credit: Isobel Dixon

Already a Nielsen Bestseller Platinum Winner, this year Peter James took home four Silvers from the Nielsen BookData Bestseller Awards – the highest number of awards awarded to a single author this year.

Based on UK sales volumes, the awards honour authors whose books have surpassed sales thresholds – Silver (250,000 sales), Gold (500,000 sales), and Platinum (1,000,000 sales).

This year’s prize-giving ceremony was held in Ham Yard Hotel with awards presented by comedian Shaparak Khorsandi. Nielsen said 199 million print books were bought in the UK in 2023, with a value of £1.83bn, with around seven in every 10 books purchased in print formats.

Peter’s silver winning titles were DEAD AT FIRST SIGHT, DEAD IF YOU DON’T, FIND THEM DEAD, and LEFT YOU DEAD, all published in the UK by Pan Macmillan. As reported in Bookbrunch, Peter joked  ‘I'm glad I've been doing some strength work in the gym’ as he accepted the framed certifications.

Other authors to have their work celebrated by the awards include Elif Shafak, Sally Rooney and Richard Osman. You can view  the full list of winners and prizes here.

Andre Breedt, managing director of Nielsen BookData, said: ‘We are thrilled to be able to host these awards once again in person and celebrate the success of authors and the teams that support them… The Bestseller Awards are unique, recognising the achievement of any author across all genres by the ultimate measurement, book sales.’

Peter received an Honorary Platinum Award in 2018, for selling over five million copies of his Roy Grace series in the UK over ten years.

The latest instalment of the Roy Grace series, STOP THEM DEAD, was published in September 2023 and went straight to Number 5 in the Sunday Times Bestseller chart after just three days on sale.It will be out in paperback on 25 April 2024. Peter’s next novel, THEY THOUGHT I WAS DEAD, will be published as a lead hardback in May 2024 by Pan Macmillan and reveals the astonishing reasons behind Sandy Grace’s sudden disappearance.

About Peter James

Photo credit: Mark Dixon

Peter James is the international bestselling author of many award-winning novels, repeatedly occupying the Number One slot on the Sunday Times bestseller charts in both hardback and paperback. Peter writes both thriller standalones and the hugely popular Brighton-set GRACE series, now adapted for ITV. Peter was featured in the launch podcast of the Queen’s Reading Room in January 2024, having had the Grace series featured on the Royal Reading Room previously.

Peter’s books have been translated into thirty-eight languages, with worldwide sales of over twenty-one million copies and his Detective Superintendent Roy Grace series, set in Brighton, has given him nineteen Sunday Times Number Ones. In 2015 WH Smith customers voted him the Greatest Crime Author of All Time and in 2016 he was awarded the coveted CWA Diamond Dagger, a lifetime  achievement award for sustained excellence. Peter James has also written two books based on true crime stories, with former senior detective Graham Bartlett, with a newly expanded edition of BABES IN THE WOOD re-issued in January 2024.

Successful nationwide tours of the stage plays of THE PERFECT MURDER (2014), DEAD SIMPLE (2015), NOT DEAD ENOUGH (2017), THE HOUSE ON COLD HILL (2019), LOOKING GOOD DEAD (2022), and WISH YOU WERE DEAD (2023) have packed theatres in dozens of British cities, and garnered magnificent reviews. Several other Peter James novels are optioned for film and in further development.

Praise for Peter James

‘Peter James is one of the best crime writers in the business’ – Karin Slaughter

‘Probably the closest we’ll get to a British Stephen King’ – The Financial Times

‘Meticulous research gives his prose great authenticity’ – Sunday Express

‘Peter James has penetrated the inner workings of police procedures, and the inner thoughts and attitudes of real detectives, as no English crime writer before him.’ – The Times

‘Peter James is one of the most fiendishly clever crime fiction plotters’ – Daily Mail

‘In my thirty-four years of policing, never have I come across a writer who so accurately depicts “The Job’’ – Detective Investigator Pat Lanigan, Office of the District Attorney, NYPD

‘One of the most consistently readable crime writers.’ – Daily Mail          

‘A master plotter’ – The Bookseller

 

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New 4K Restoration of Gilbert Adair’s THE DREAMERS to Receive UK Premiere at the British Film Institute

Image: Recorded Picture Company

We are delighted to announce that THE DREAMERS – the 2003 film adapted by the late Gilbert Adair from his own novel, and directed by Academy Award-winning Bernardo Bertolucci (THE LAST EMPEROR, LAST TANGO IN PARIS) – has been restored in sparkling 4K quality, and will receive its UK premiere next month at the BFI Southbank.

Tickets to the premiere on 27 February are available now on the BFI website (18:10, BFI Southbank). The screening will be followed by a Q&A with Bernardo and Gilbert’s collaborator, Recorded Pictures Company producer Jeremy Thomas. The film will also be re-released on 4K Ultra-HD Blu-Ray on 22 April 2024, and is available to pre-order now.

THE DREAMERS is an evocative, sensual and disarmingly nostalgic portrait of three young cinema lovers caught up in the political turmoil of 1968 Paris. Originally published as THE HOLY INNOCENTS in 1988, Gilbert simultaneously reworked the material for both the film script and a new version of the novel, retitled THE DREAMERS, which was published in the UK by Faber & Faber. The film, starring Eva Green (CASINO ROYALE), Louis Garrel (LITTLE WOMEN) and Michael Pitt (BOARDWALK EMPIRE) first premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2003, winning rave reviews from the likes of Roger Ebert, Philip French and Peter Bradshaw.

THE DREAMERS was restored in 4K by Cinetica Bologna in collaboration with Recorded Picture Company, the production company behind the film. The technical work was done by L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory from the original negatives, and had its world premiere as part of Il Cinema Ritrovato festival in July 2023, in Bologna’s Piazza Maggiore. The screening was introduced by producer Jeremy Thomas, with Academy Award-nominated director Luca Guadagnino (CALL ME BY YOUR NAME), and actress Marisa Paredes (LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL).

THE DREAMERS is set in Paris, Spring of 1968: the city is beginning to emerge from hibernation and an obscure spirit of social and political renewal is in the air. Yet Théo, his twin sister Isabelle and Matthew, an American student they have befriended, think only of immersing themselves in another, addictive form of hibernation: moviegoing at the Cinémathèque Française. Night after night, they take their place beside their fellow cinephiles in the very front row of the stalls and feast insatiably off the images that flicker across the vast white screen.

Denied their nightly 'fix' when the French government suddenly orders the Cinémathèque's closure, Théo, Isabelle and Matthew gradually withdraw into a hermetically sealed universe of their own creation, an airless universe of obsessive private games, ordeals, humiliations and sexual jousting which finds them shedding their clothes and their inhibitions with equal abandon. A vertiginous free fall interrupted only, and tragically, when the real world outside their shuttered apartment succeeds at last in encroaching on their delirium.

Image: Lin Leong

About Gilbert Adair

A cultural observer, journalist, broadcaster, critic, translator, screenwriter and award-winning novelist, Gilbert Adair wrote regular columns for The Sunday Times, Esquire, and Independent on Sunday. He died in 2011.

His books have been published on both sides of the Atlantic and translated into twenty languages. Amongst his finest achievements were his novels THE DREAMERS, which Gilbert adapted himself for the ‘extraordinarily beautiful’ (Roger Ebert) 2003 film directed by Bernardo Bertolucci, and LOVE AND DEATH ON LONG ISLAND (adapted for the screen by Richard Kwietnieowski in 1997, with John Hurt playing the leading role) as well as his translation of Georges Perec’s LA DISPARATION, published in English under the title A VOID and achieved, like the original text, without use of the letter ‘e’.

Praise for the film THE DREAMERS

‘Director Bernardo Bertolucci has simply given us his best picture for many years, working from an elegant, urbane screenplay by Gilbert Adair… Watching this film is like drinking a bottle of good red wine, all at once, on an empty stomach. Not good for you, but wickedly pleasurable all the same.’ – Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

‘An evocative reminiscence of an era when cinema and politics could count for as much as carnal passion.’ – Time Out

‘A brilliant critic, pasticheur and aphorist, Adair is one of those Scots who have bypassed English metropolitan culture and have become very much at home in the French literary and intellectual tradition… Adair has now adapted his novel for the screen as THE DREAMERS, and as his novel is about politics, transgressive sex and the cinema itself, he has found a perfect collaborator in Bernardo Bertolucci… an amusing, sophisticated movie, true to its times, cheerfully erotic, and played with unselfconscious conviction by its three young actors.’ – Philip French, The Observer

‘Disarmingly sweet and completely enchanting.’ – A. O. Scott, The New York Times

‘A masterpiece’ – The Telegraph

‘Sexy and Provocative.’ – Dazed and Confused

‘He writes … as if he were making a thousand angels dance on the head of a pin.’ – Kevin Jackson, Independent on Sunday

Deon Meyer’s DEVIL’S PEAK goes international with US premiere on Tubi

Following its successful home debut in South Africa on M-Net,  DEVIL’S PEAK – the 5-part miniseries adaptation of Deon Meyer’s prize-winning 2005 novel – has been picked up for further international distribution, with the USA and Canada next to discover police detective Benny Griessel’s world. Exclusive North American rights have been acquired for Tubi’s video-on-demand service, and the series premiered on the platform on 15 January 2024.

On behalf of Tubi, Chief Content Officer Adam Lewinson said: ‘DEVIL’S PEAK is a gripping crime drama that showcases the talent as well as the unique landscape of South Africa. Tubi is committed to providing our diverse audiences with an extensive selection of premium content, and DEVIL’S PEAK promises to captivate U.S. audiences as it has in other parts of the world.’

The series is also available in New Zealand – where it is already streaming on ThreeNow – and will air in the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg on BBC First, broadcasting every Sunday at 21:00 (CET) from 21 January 2024.

Produced by Lookout Point and Expanded Media Productions, with backing by BBC Studios and Multichoice Studios, the series stars Hilton Pelser (THE KISSING BOOTH, MOFFIE) as Benny, with Sisanda Henna (who starred in previous Deon Meyer adaptation TRACKERS), Tarryn Wyngaard, Shamilla Miller, and Masasa Mbangeni. The 5 x 1-hour series is directed by Jozua Malherbe (JUSTICE SERVED, GRIEKWASTAD) and written by Matthew Orton (MOON KNIGHT, OPERATION FINALE). International distribution for the show is being handled by BBC Studios.

DEVIL’S PEAK sees the talented but broken Benny Griessel tracking down a righteous vigilante killer whose crimes are capturing the imagination of the city. Meanwhile, grieving father Thobela Mpayipheli seeks justice after the untimely murder of his son. Benny and Thobela are brought into the orbit of a trapped mother, Christine, who is willing to do anything to achieve a better life for herself and her daughter, and the fates of these three characters become inextricably linked. Combining gripping tension with uncompromising authenticity, DEVIL’S PEAK offers an original South African take on the investigative thriller for today.

Originally published in Afrikaans as INFANTA in 2005, DEVIL’S PEAK won the ATKV Prize in South Africa and won the Svenska Oversatta Kriminalroman (Martin Beck) Award and the Readers’ Award from CritiquesLibres.com in October 2010. The book is published in English in the UK and Canada by Hodder & Stoughton, and in the USA by Little, Brown, as well as in many translation markets.

About Deon Meyer

Deon Meyer lives in Stellenbosch. His books are sold in 23 countries, and have been awarded many prizes around the world: the Deutsche Krimi Prize in Germany, the ATKV Prize in South Africa, the Martin Beck Award in Sweden and Le Grand Prix de Littérature Policière and Le Prix Mystère de la Critique in France. COBRA was shortlisted for the 2015 CWA International Dagger, THIRTEEN HOURS was shortlisted for the 2010 CWA International Dagger, and HEART OF THE HUNTER, was longlisted for the 2005 IMPAC Prize and selected as one of Chicago Tribune’s ‘10 best mysteries and thrillers of 2004’. THE DARK FLOOD was longlisted for the 2023 CWA Dagger for Crime Fiction in Translation. His latest novel LEO, a new Benny Griessel thriller, enjoyed ten weeks at the top of the South African bestseller lists, Number One in all categories.

Praise for the novel DEVIL’S PEAK

‘This is one of those entertainment fictions that teaches one more than any textbook or documentary. This thriller is a fascinating portrayal of one aspect of life in post-apartheid South Africa…winding up the tension to a gripping, shocking climax. Highly recommended.’ – Literary Review

‘Deon Meyer is…one of the sharpest and most perceptive thriller writers around…Meyer paints a wonderful picture of the dark side of the rainbow nation… Against the odds Meyer leaves us with a resolution that is both poignant and supremely satisfying. In no way is this a negative book about the new South Africa. It makes the place come alive with a breathless urgency that recalls the 1940s Los Angeles of Dashiel Hammet or Raymond Chandler: a bit mad, a bit bad, a bit dangerous, but exotically vibrant, a society in adolescence. Think of Meyer in the way that you might have regarded a bottle of Cape red a dozen years ago – dark, strong with an unusual but beguilingly moreish taste. If it can produce popular literature as good as this, the new South Africa has a lot going for it.’ – Peter Millar, The Times

‘It isn’t just about the action. A far, far cry from your basic ‘cops and robbers’ or blow-by-blow ‘good guys v bad guys’, DEVIL’S PEAK is a grown-up and multi-faceted tale, tough and visceral in tone, but also rich in flawed characters and deeply redolent of both urban and rural South Africa; not just the geographic landscape, but the political and social scene as well.’ – Paul Finch

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