Book Bites

Good For A Girl: A Woman Running in a Man’s World ★★★★★ Lauren Fleshman, Virago

Lauren Fleshman has been described as the “best American distance runner never to make an Olympic team”. Now a successful coach and entrepreneur, she uses her story to highlight how women athletes are failed by sporting culture and organisations. She provides constructive criticism, science and solutions to issues that sabotage women from meeting their full athletic potential. Under the spotlight are coaching methods, outdated nutritional and training mandates, and corporate sponsorship. There are insights and stories from her own dealings with Nike’s ugly attitude towards women, as athletes and as a consumer market. A fascinating, insightful, constructive and moving read. — Tiah Beautement @ms_tiahmarie

Pause: Are You Making the Right Choices? ★★★ Thabo ‘T-Bose’ Mokwele, Tracy McDonald Publishers

This is an inspiring offering by Thabo Mokwele, affectionately known as “T-Bose” to listeners to his Kaya FM programme. The veteran broadcaster engages in insightful conversation with interesting guests, and ‘Pause’ is an ongoing conversation from his show and blog. This is not just a self-help book, but a collection of reflections and meditations on life, money, parenting and relationships. Filled with nuggets of wisdom, it seeks to inform and inspire, but the execution tends to be on the derivative side. — Shaun Lunga

A Deadly Covenant ★★★★ Michael Stanley, Simon & Schuster

This is the eighth book in the Detective Kubu series and the second in which he’s starting as a detective in the Botswana CID. He and Scottish pathologist Ian MacGregor are sent to a small village near the Okavango Delta where a contractor building a water pipeline unearths a skeleton. Their investigation uncovers eight more skeletons at what looks to be a massacre that took place in the past 50 years. Then two elders are killed. Kubu thinks the crimes could be connected but his skills as a detective are not sharp enough and he needs assistant superintendent Mabaku to help dig up what happened in the village. Michael Stanley is Michael Sears and Stanley Trollip and they get better and better at writing these tight, twisty, authentic crime stories. — Jennifer Platt