Tweespoor, by Helena Gunter

Helena Gunter’s skinny two-part work, with its dull brown cover featuring a faded-looking abstract drawing, looks harmless enough. What it is, in fact, is a cat o’ nine tails in the shape of a book. It is in Afrikaans, written about Afrikaners of a certain generation, but if there were ever a soul-scouring Afrikaans literary work that should be read in English as well as all the other world languages, it is this one. (Keep reading about the book here, and read more about the author’s process, here.)