Herman Charles Bosman, was one of South Africa’s best-loved and most popular writers. Bosman’s stories have become well-loved. This collection contains many favourite stories of the wars and loves, prejudices and insights of a backveld Afrikaner community.  In 1926 Herman Charles Bosman was appointed to a teaching position in the Groot Marico district of the then Western Transvaal. The place and the people enthralled him, and provided him with the background for his best-known works. ‘There is no other place I know that is so heavy with atmosphere, so strangely and darkly impregnated with that stuff of life that bears the authentic stamp of South Africa,’ he wrote in Marico Revisited.
The poet Roy Campbell called Herman Charles Bosman’s stories of the wars and loves, faiths and superstitions, prejudice and insights of a backveld community “the best short stories that ever came out of South Africa.” Others have called them the best Afrikaans stories ever written in English.

In this centenary selection Mynhardt brings to loyal readers, as well as to a generation not yet acquainted with Bosman’s genius, his personal choice of the best of them.

Patrick Mynhardt was one of South Africa’s premier theatre and film actors.