The dangers of political violence and the possibilities of non-violence were the central themes of three lives which changed the twentieth century - Leo Tolstoy, writer and aristocrat who turned against his class, Mohandas Gandhi who corresponded with Tolstoy and considered him the mostimportant person of the time, and Nelson Mandela, prisoner and statesman, who read War and Peace on Robben Island and who, despite having led a campaign of sabotage, saw himself as a successor to Gandhi.Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Mandela tried to create transformed societies to replace the dying forms of colony and empire. They found the inequalities of Russia, India, and South Africa intolerable yet they questioned the wisdom of seizing the power of the state, creating new kinds of politicalorganisation and imagination to replace the old promises of revolution. Their views, along with their ways of leading others, are closely connected, from their insistence on working with their own hands and reforming their individual selves to their acceptance of death. On three continents, in acentury of mass mobilization and conflict, they promoted strains of nationalism devoid of antagonism, prepared to take part in a general peace.Looking at Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Mandela in sequence, taking into account their letters and conversations as well as the institutions they created or subverted, placing at the centre their treatment of the primal fantasy of political violence, this volume reveals a vital radical tradition whichstands outside the conventional categories of twentieth-century history and politics.

Revolution and Non-Violence in Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Mandela

Literature & Fiction

Coovadia, Imraan

History & Criticism

Oxford University Press

The Wedding: A Novel

Set in India and South Africa, The Wedding joins Ismet Nassin, a clerk of modest prospects from Bombay, and the village beauty he marries on the very day he spies her from the window of his train. Matrimony happens fast, love lags behind. Khateja is willful, difficult, and misanthropic—in short, highly desirable. Ismet is in for the battle of his life. Based upon the story of his grandparents and his own upbringing in Durban, South Africa, Imraan Coovadia’s The Wedding is a brilliantly funny and tender first novel—an alternately poignant and hilarious story about the choices we make and the homes that we build. The Wedding is a witty and wonderful subcontinental version of The Taming of the Shrew.

Literary

Picador

Set in India and South Africa, The Wedding joins Ismet Nassin, a clerk of modest prospects from Bombay, and Khateja, a village beauty he marries on the very day he spies her from the window of his train. Matrimony happens fast, love lags behind. Khateja is willful, difficult, and misanthropic—in short, highly desirable. Ismet is in for the battle of his life. Based upon the story of his grandparents and his own upbringing in Durban, South Africa, Imraan Coovadia has written a brilliantly funny and tender first novel—an alternately poignant and hilarious story about the choices we make and the homes that we build. The Wedding is a witty and wonderful subcontinental The Taming of the Shrew.

In Tales of the Metric System, Coovadia explores a turbulent South Africa from 1970 into the present. He takes his home country's transition from imperial to metric measurements as his catalyst, holding South Africa up and examining it from the diverse perspectives of his many characters. An elite white housewife married to a radical intellectual; a rock guitarist; the same guitarist's granddaughter thirty years later; a teenaged boy at the mercy of mob justice—each story takes place over one of ten days across the decades, and each protagonist has his own stakes, her own moment in time, but each is equally caught in the eddies of change. Tales of the Metric System is clear eyed, harrowing, and daring.

Tales of the Metric System: A Novel (Modern African Writing Series)

Ohio University Press

In Tales of the Metric System, Coovadia explores a turbulent South Africa from 1970 into the present. He takes his home country’s transition from imperial to metric measurements as his catalyst, holding South Africa up and examining it from the diverse perspectives of his many characters. An elite white housewife married to a radical intellectual; a rock guitarist; the same guitarist’s granddaughter thirty years later; a teenaged boy at the mercy of mob justice—each story takes place over one of ten days across the decades, and each protagonist has his own stakes, her own moment in time, but each is equally caught in the eddies of change. Tales of the Metric System is clear eyed, harrowing, and daring.

Green-eyed Thieves

Umuzi

High Low In - between

From a Natal boarding school in the seventies and Soviet spies in London in the eighties to the 1995 Rugby World Cup and intrigue in the Union Buildings, Tales of the Metric System shows how ten days spread across four decades send tidal waves through the lives of ordinary and extraordinary South Africans alike. 
An unforgettable cast of characters includes Ann, who is trying to protect her husband and son in 1970, and Victor, whose search for a missing document in 1973 will change his life forever. Rock guitarist Yash takes his boy to the beach on Boxing Day in 1979 to meet his revolutionary cousin, while Shanti, his granddaughter, loses her cellphone and falls in love twice on a lucky afternoon in 2010. 
Playwrights, politicians, philosophers, and thieves, all caught in their individual stories, burst from the pages of Imraan Coovadia’s Tales of the Metric System as it measures South Africa’s modern history in its own remarkable units of imagination.

Tales of the Metric System: Telling South Africa's History One Day at a Time

Penguin Random House South Africa

Hardly a conventional family history, Green-Eyed Thieves tells the story of the fortunes of a family of crooks—the green-eyed thieves of the title. The matriarch of this unusual family is a university lecturer and an accomplished shoplifter, and her husband is a master thief whose ingeneous exploits include relieving the Aga Khan of his wardrobe of expensive suits—since they both happened to be the same size. An uncle, universally known as Ten-Per-Cent Farouk, lives with the family in Fordsburg, a suburb of Johannesburg. And Firoze, the narrator of this wickedly humorous novel from South African writer Imraan Coovadia, is a dreamer and a bookworm, who is radically different from, but inextricably bound to, his identical twin, Ashraf. 
Green-Eyed Thieves follows this clan of skilled criminals and the twins as they embark on a series of mind-boggling adventures that include a love triangle with the twins’ perfect match, a masterly heist at Sun City, and a surprise appearance at the White House. Including cameos by George W. Bush, Mohammed Atta, and a Pakistani Brigadier in Peshawar, these original and lively family adventures are sure to delight.

Green-Eyed Thieves (The Africa List)

Humor & Satire

Seagull Books

Enver Eleven is twenty-five years old and ready for adventure. He’s the Agency’s newest recruit, eager to leap through his first gate into an unfamiliar time. In Enver’s home city of Johannesburg, fair-skinned people are a rarity and have been for centuries. The people of Johannesburg were spared the ravages of the apocalypse because of the thousands of miles of mining tunnels running beneath it. The Agency’s thinking machines have set his first mission for Marrakesh, circa 1955. His handler is the tough and taciturn Shanumi Six. Their mission: prevent the apocalypse from happening again. But when a cabal of temporal chaos-bringers kidnaps Shanumi, Enver must strike out across the timeline’s hotspots―Rio de Janeiro 1967, Johannesburg 2271―on a mission to preserve our very existence. His journeys put him in the middle of a catastrophe which will force him to put his assumptions to the test in an atmosphere of conspiracy and intrigue. Award-winning novelist Imraan Coovadia (The Wedding, Tales of the Metric System) returns with this crackling Afrofuturistic tale of intrigue in which the course of human history hangs in the balance.

A Spy in Time

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Science Fiction

Rare Bird Books

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Coovadia, Imraan. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Coovadia, Imraan

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Coovadia, Imraan. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Revolution and Non-Violence in Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Mandela

The Wedding: A Novel

The Wedding: A Novel

Tales of the Metric System: A Novel (Modern African Writing Series)

Tales of the Metric System: A Novel (Modern African Writing Series)

Green-eyed Thieves

High Low In - between

Tales of the Metric System: Telling South Africa's History One Day at a Time

Green-Eyed Thieves (The Africa List)

A Spy in Time