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The Shaping of Water book cover

THE SHAPING OF WATER

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The Love and Wisdom Crimes Book Cover

THE LOVE & WISDOM CRIMES

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The Spiral-Bound Notebooks book cover

THE SPIRAL-BOUND NOTEBOOKS

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Dust and Rain book cover

DUST AND RAIN

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When I Was Bad book cover

WHEN I WAS BAD

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When We Were Wicked book cover

WHEN WE WERE WICKED

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The Tin Heart Gold Mine book cover

THE TIN HEART GOLD MINE

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Dust and Rain

BY RUTH HARTLEY

Chipo and Chibwe save the Green Valley

Two children make a perilous journey through the heart of modern and magical Africa to save their parents’ farm in the Green Valley from drought and climate change.

Kambili and the drought arrive in a whirlwind of dust into the lives of CHIPO, an eleven-year-old girl with a special gift, and her brother, CHIBWE.

Without rain, the family can’t grow food. so the children run away to find Makemba, the Wise Woman in the Evergreen Forest who can teach them how to keep their valley green.

They are kidnapped by criminals but escape and have extraordinary adventures as they journey to find Makemba and then take her magical river water to save the Valley and end the drought.


Dust and Rain


By Ruth Hartley

I poured my love for Zambia and planet Earth into this climate-change adventure. Published by Gadsden.
"... facts are woven in a colourful tapestry of magic and adventure with talking animals, birds and insects, and mythical creatures who tell us in crystal clear language of their role in the environment. ... I recommend this book as a school reader and textbook. ... A stupendous odyssey."Verona Mwelwa, Teacher
"This inspiring children’s book about conservation and good agriculture practice … should really be considered for the school curriculum."Guida Belcross, Lusaka Recycling
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The Drought Witch clutching the children
Rain Queen with children in tree

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When We Were Wicked

BY RUTH HARTLEY

In a wicked world are there any innocent survivors?


Sinners and saints, villains and heroes, the children, women and men in these stories all find ways to survive in wicked times.

Some of these stories are old and were written down decades ago. Some are new.

Some of these stories make me laugh. Some stories were inspired by my ill-spent youth. Some are wicked inventions.

Two are short memoirs about wicked people. I fell over them so often in dark dreams that I was forced to dig them out of the sludge of my memory and expose them to light.

"I was so much older then, when I was young." — as Eric Burdon and the Animals sang in 1967


When We Were Wicked


By Ruth Hartley

A compelling selection of stories, light-hearted, funny and serious, some achingly true, some entirely invented, all absorbing.
"... the lean style gave it authenticity, helped by your acute and sensitive selection of detail — such as your mother 'winding the windows until they were almost shut.' The sparseness of your prose (is) the product of years of shaping and moulding words and phrases, mastering that art called 'writing'."Michael Holman, FT Africa Editor, 1984–2002

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Ruth Hartley 1961 and 2019

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The Love and Wisdom Crimes

BY RUTH HARTLEY

A coming of age adventure story about a young woman who discovers that, in apartheid South Africa, it is dangerous to love a revolutionary and a crime to love someone black.

Trying to make sense of her past and her present, Jane visits the South Africa of her youth and finds that the conflicts of her life then have their echo in her life now.

An accompanying book of poetry, The Spiral-Bound Notebooks, contains the poems that inspired this novel.

Ruth Hartley said, "I want my readers to live inside my stories and experience them as ‘true’ even though they are fictional, even when I rework my own life experiences.

It seems absurd to me, though probably not to my children, that my novels set in my youth slot into the genre of historical fiction. When I write a novel, I’m creating a world in which all the characters are true to themselves."


The Love and Wisdom Crimes


By Ruth Hartley

Deft, impressive writing, evocative of place and time in which political dangers lie hidden like land mines.

Jane's story of travel from a peaceable, silent life at the home farm to the city where she is catapulted into an underground anti-apartheid political intrigue, ... skilfully draws the reader in as we hold our breath for her and her friends. ... a lyricism ... points up the contrasts of Africa, (its) sheer beauty and the terrible ugliness of the politics.Claudia Nayler

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Ruth Hartley 1961 and 2019

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The Spiral-Bound Notebooks

BY RUTH HARTLEY

"My notebooks contain not just the marks of a pen, but the living memories that glued me and my soul together as I journeyed through life. I really don’t know how they survived for so long. Sometimes all that a refugee or a migrant can carry from home are the words and music of a song.

Most of the poems in this chapbook come from my life in South Africa but some were written in secret during my married life in Zambia. I hid them away in a blue folder in the spare room that doubled as my sewing room and writing study.

Perhaps it is in these private creative spaces that our human freedoms are made and preserved?"


The Spiral-Bound Notebooks


By Ruth Hartley

Ruth Hartley’s poetry collection has real range, a strong political awareness, beautiful imagery, the dark night of the soul, but finally, light and hope.
"Many of the poems ... recall this time of unrest and confusion in South Africa. Ruth captures the feel of the country, the poverty, the damage, the loss of freedom, she mixes her fear and anger at the time with images of the Africa she had grown to love. There were times when she feared for her life due to her close connection with the anti-Apartheid movement."Kate Rose, Bonjour Limousin

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Photo by Adrian Frith - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0

"I began to write poetry in spiral-bound stenography notebooks while at university in South Africa. It was a way of resisting apartheid but also of discovering who I was and wanted to become. Poetry can be an intense and economic diary. The notebooks came too when I ran away to London and by some miracle are still with me today. They remained hidden for long years until their ideas germinated into more poetry, my novel, The Love and Wisdom Crimes and my memoir, When I Was Bad" Ruth Hartley



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When I Was Bad

BY RUTH HARTLEY

In the 1930s George Bernard Shaw's black girl searches for God, but settles down in a garden with an Irish socialist. In 1966 I was the bad white girl — an unmarried mother and a criminal according to the laws of South Africa.

My 1996-1997 memoir of love and exile starts on Victoria Station. Exile is not a word on paper but a lived experience. It is a lonely, bitter place of loss and nostalgia, as I had yet to find out. It’s the opposite of home. I was exiling myself to a place I didn’t know, where I had no friends or relatives. Exile is not a holiday trip. You can’t travel back from it. Exile is loss; it’s a version of dying.

I wasn’t sure whether my family would cast me out when they learnt the real reason I was in England. At that moment on Victoria Station it was too late for a change of plan. But I’d never thought that going home was a real option anyway.


When I Was Bad


By Ruth Hartley

When, pregnant and afraid, I escaped to swinging London, I found that being in love and learning to be a loving mother was considerably more complicated than I had imagined.

“A memoir is not a story where the characters are understood from inside to outside by their creator. It is a steamy mirror on which I draw a self-portrait with a damp finger. It is supposedly a reflection of what I was, but it can’t be that exactly because it is made by me as I am now. No amount of soul-searching can take me far enough out of myself to objectively describe my actuality.

Ruth Hartley

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Black and white image of a young woman in a striped t-shirt with baby in a cloth carrier on her back at at demonstration outside Marlborough House in London in 1966. She wears sunglasses and had her hair tied back. A policeman stands in the background next to a placard bearing the words SOUTH WEST AF...

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The Tin Heart Gold Mine

BY RUTH HARTLEY

Heart of Darkness and Lust for Life collide as the Cold War in Africa gets hot.

Lara, the artist, loves Oscar, a suave, older entrepreneur, and owner of the Tin Heart Gold Mine. She also loves Tim, a journalist seeking truth.

The Tin Heart Gold Mine is a dramatic story, about vibrant, intriguing characters passionate about art, love, the making of money and the African bush, whose lives become entangled in war and politics.

How well do we ever know the people we love?


The Tin Heart Gold Mine


By Ruth Hartley

On the surface, this is a story of an artist in Africa seeking personal fulfilment. Deeper, it is about betrayal, hard choices, personal and social violence.

On her way, artist Lara encounters Tim, an idealistic foreign correspondent, and Oscar, an older man with a mysterious past. At the end you are left with doubt — Will Tim come back? Can Oscar really be dead? and who is the father of Lara’s child? A fascinating read!

John Corley

Ruth Hartley on Talk Radio Europe, Spain, March 2017


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The Shaping of Water

BY RUTH HARTLEY

The vast man-made Lake Kariba in Zambia is built on political and geological fault lines. Built to generate power and maintain colonial power, it drowns a valley and displaces Milimo and his mother Natombi.

Charles and Margaret love the lake and their holiday cottage on its shore, but their way of life is endangered. Marielise and Jo take respite at the cottage from their exhausting battle against apartheid. Manda and Nick confront their damaged relationship.

They are all connected by a secret known only to the priest, Father Patrick.

Lake Shelter at Kariba Dam mentioned in The Shaping of Water by Ruth Hartley


The Shaping of Water


By Ruth Hartley

As ideals and dreams founder on the rocks of political realities, three couples and a mother and son search for ways to keep the faith.
A very good read. Interconnected lives are affected by the creation of the Kariba dam. The unintended consequence is an altered ecosystem and the separation of populations and countries. ... Visitors leave comments in the guest book of a cottage on the lake shore. The water level rises and falls and the natural world of plants and birds is woven into the story in brilliant passages of calm in the midst of turmoil.Polly Loxton (Amazon UK 28/01/14)

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The Cottage Guest Book

Guestbook that was the basis for The Shaping of Water by Ruth Hartley

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The White and Black Blues

BY RUTH HARTLEY

I released this short story collection to coincide with Marciac Jazz Festival 2016, as a free paperback to promote my novels.

The title story, The White and Black Blues, tells how Tom Waller was born in the wrong skin in Africa.

His friendship with black jazz musicians transforms his life, and takes him on a long journey away from his harsh father and their failing farm in Africa, but he must still discover who he really is “under his skin”.

This story grew out of my memory of the visit of the great Louis Armstrong to Rhodesia in 1960 and the pleasure I have in jazz today.


The White and Black Blues


By Ruth Hartley

The White and Black Blues contains the title story, selections from three novels and a memoir, another short story and a poem.

"Skokiaan" is a tune by Rhodesian (Zimbabwean) musician August Musarurwa (aka Msarurgwa, d. 1968) in the tsaba-tsaba big-band style that succeeded marabi. Skokiaan (Chikokiyana in Shona) refers to an illegal self-made alcoholic beverage. Within a year of its 1954 release in South Africa, it reached No. 2 on the USA Cash Box charts. Many artists produced interpretations, including Louis Armstrong, who performed it in Rhodesia as recorded in the title story .

Ruth Hartley





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The Colourless Child

BY RUTH HARTLEY

Nine-year-old Busiku is a pawn in a political game. His stepfather, Carl, a mixed-race Jew, stands with Saviour Kasaba in a presidential election while international interests destabilise the Republic.

After a traumatic marriage, Hannah runs a student B&B. She must care for Busiku and keep murder from her door. Hannah’s sister Jude, Carl's ex, learns that their daughter Natasha is antisemitic. Jude’s lover Wezi, an artist dying of AIDS, advises Natasha to study art. Carl’s Jewish mother Lila chose the New Age over religion, but in Europe must face the Holocaust. Hannah’s father Frikkie, an evangelical Afrikaans Christian, unwittingly aids Busiku’s assassins. Hannah’s mother, aka Spidermother, lives on the internet. She writes the forgotten stories of how we came to be the people we don’t know we are, and whom we might choose to be if we understood our history.

Natasha finds it hard to be neither white nor black and Busiku knows it's dangerous to be colourless, and blind in the dark. Can Hannah, Natasha, and Busiku transform ‘otherness’ into online art and sing and dance to stay alive?


The Colourless Child


By Ruth Hartley

An alternative title for Ruth's current work-in-progress is How to be (insert whatever you want to be) in Africa or How2B(^)inAfrica. Can art, music and storytelling bridge differences?

An NBC News article asks, "Do white artists have the right to depict Black pain?" Art professor Dr. Lisa Whittington says, “As artists—responsible artists—we are to speak and to document history. We are to tell about life from our point of view from where we stand.”

Must white artists limit themselves to their own culture or their guilt and wrongdoing vis-à-vis other cultures? Who says so? History? Culture? Society? Can I explore injustice and oppression only if I have identical experiences? How do Germans face up to the Holocaust or South Africans to apartheid? My characters face these questions.

Ruth Hartley


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