Our book bundles are here to make gifting to your loved ones easier! Whether you’re Christmas shopping, looking for the perfect birthday gift for that book-loving friend of yours or just want to show someone you love them, our book bundles are here to save the day. We’ve handpicked two titles that have some things in common so that you can find the right books to give the reader in your life.
Bundles will ship immediately (same or next business day) and are wrapped in our signature brown paper bags. So, if you want to buy yourself a bookish treat, who are we to stop you?
Want to switch out the tote colour? No problems! Just shoot us an email at hello@wellread.com.au and we’ll sort it out.
In this bundle: Two literary fiction titles from South African authors, plus a signature navy WellRead tote bag with an illustration by Blue Mountains artist Oliver Carney.
Perfect for gifting to: The reader in your life who loves family-led stories, unravelling mysteries of the past, and the rich storytelling setting of South Africa.
The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years by Shubnum Khan
In an old wardrobe a djinn sits weeping. It whimpers and murmurs small words of complaint. It sucks its teeth and berates the heavens for its fate. It curses the day it ever entered this damned house.
Akbar Manzil was once a grand estate overlooking the sparkling ocean beyond South Africa's eastern coast. Now, its Palladian windows and marble parapets, its golden domes and Romanesque towers have fallen into disrepair.
Now, Akbar Manzil is where people come to forget, or to be forgotten.
Teenage Sana arrives with her father, Bilal, both of them hoping for a fresh start after the tragedies that have blighted their family. But when the ghost of Sana's sister alerts her to the presence of a djinn that lingers just out of reach in the shadowy corners of the house, Sana embarks on a quest to uncover the history of her unnerving new home. Soon, her own story intertwines with that of a young woman who lived there some eighty years earlier, a woman whose tragic fate holds the key to Akbar Manzil's ultimate secret.
Endlessly playful and richly imaginative, Shubnum Khan's vibrant debut delves into the transformative powers of love and grief as it explores the legacy of South Africa's complicated past.
Crooked Seeds by Karen Jennings
A woman in post-apartheid South Africa confronts her family's troubled past in this taut and compelling novel from the Booker Prize longlisted author of An Island.
In her parched, crumbling corner of a Cape Town public housing complex, Deidre van Deventer receives a call from the police. The remains of several bodies have just been unearthed from her family's former home, after decades underground. Detectives pepper her with questions about her brother, and his dealings with a pro-apartheid group in the 1990s with terrorist leanings.
Deirdre doesn't know the answers to most of these questions. All she knows is that she was denied-repeatedly-the life she felt she deserved. But as alarming evidence from the investigation continues to surface, and detectives pressure her to share what she knows of her family's disturbing past, Deidre must finally confront her own shattered memories so that something better might emerge from what remains. Crooked Seeds is a singularly powerful novel, in exquisitely spare prose, about the ways we become trapped in prisons of our own making.
