I grew up with Bosman on the family bookshelf, and launched into his tales of South African life at an early age - my family have teethed on his stories as he attended the same high school as my father, which therefore makes him almost part of the family I guess!

He gives a unique insight into the humour and pathos which characterised that country in the days before the second World War. Although he is best known for his short stories and poems of South African life, there are two of his book-length stories included in this Collection - Mafeking Road (perhaps my most favourite) and Cold Stone Jug (from his time spent in jail).

Some of the short stories are depressingly sad, but no matter whether they are sad or filled with humour - they do give you a realistic impression of what life was like in the years of apartheid in which he lived. Bosman has not always been popular with his fellow countrymen, mainly, I think, because of his ability to scratch below the veneer of their life-surface and expose their soft uderbelly. He pokes his finger with a toungue-in-cheek look at South African (mainly Afrikaans) life and relationships between the different colour and ethnic groups.

I was sad to learn that this book is out of print, as my copy is badly in need of replacing now ... might be worth a re-think by the publishers, perhaps!

In this book of delightful short stories about the Marico, in South Africa, Herman Charles Bosman tells the stories of various characters of this district. His description of them are so vivid that you expect one popping from a page at any moment. Some are hilarious and some leave you with a tear. In these stories, the 'hard life' and how they tried to overcome the obstacles are very well portrayed.
An excellent read!

An extremely rainy summer in Pretoria gave ground to more reading then had been expectet beforehand, and my usual stock of books were not in my posession. This turned out to be a stroke of luck, as it were, because rather than turning to my own, I had to turn to the bookshelves of my landlady. Mafeking road and other storys caugth my eyes; an hour later it had also caught my heart. Bosman spinns storys out of the everyday life in the Groot Maroco district as easely as he use the history of the Transvaal republic as the setting for his tales. His storys are funny, sad, warm and exiting, often all at once. His talent as a storyteller is indesputeble, and his love for the ways and traditions of the people of the Marico is impossible to hide. Not for nothing is his storys said to be the best to ever come out of South Africa. This book has my warmest recomodation. If you read it , you will never regret. If you don't, it is your loss.