Bestselling author and anti-apartheid activist Janet Levine brings South Africa’s history, people and culture to life through a multi-generational saga, Liv’s Secrets. Inspired in part by Levine’s own experiences, Liv’s Secrets is available in several formats as well as an audiobook powerfully narrated by jazz singer and actress Jerzy Jung.
Levine explains:
The book is partly my lived experience growing up in South Africa amid a large extended Jewish family with Eastern European roots. I grew up under an autocratic, racist, Christian National government. A regime described extensively in Liv’s Secrets.
Janet Levine, Author
Liv’s Secrets weaves the intimate lives of three powerful women across three generations of the Weisz family, one among a great wave of Jewish immigrants in the latter part of the 19th century. While most washed up in America, a wavelet of Lithuanian Jews, like the Weiszes, landed on South Africa’s shores.
Noteworthy historical figures, including Alan Paton and Helen Suzman, interact with Levine’s compelling characters amid the background of South Africa’s racial turmoil and apartheid’s authoritarian iron fist. Not least of the characters is South Africa itself —landscape of astonishing beauty and nature’s abundant flora and fauna.
As decades pass, readers witness the drama-romance, first loves, lust, betrayal, true love, despair and elation, cruelty and evil, hope and fulfilment of generations of Weisz family members. Always in the background is the chilling reality of World Wars and escalating racial tensions within South Africa that culminate in the bloody Sharpeville Massacre in March 1960, and its aftermath.
From 1960, the saga pivots on the third generation, embodied by Liv Weisz. Five years earlier, a recent divorcee, passionate and headstrong, she heeds the call to become part of the resistance to the authoritarian white apartheid government. And pays an unimaginable price with resounding consequences for many characters, as the country itself undergoes seismic, racially evoked challenges.
About the Author
Janet Levine is a South African born American bestselling author of six traditionally published books, including Inside Apartheid, The Enneagram Intelligences and Liv’s Secrets. She is currently working on her seventh book, The Awakening of Diya Sharma. A lifelong journalist, Levine’s work has been published in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books and The Yale Review, among many other outlets. She is also a book reviewer for the New York Journal of Books and has appeared on Fresh Air, and most national TV outlets. Deeply involved in South African politics, she has traveled extensively internationally. As a public representative on the Johannesburg City Council, she interacted with national and international journalists and embassy personnel from many countries. In the United States, she taught philosophy and literature for 30 years at Milton Academy, Massachusetts, while continuing her writing career.
For more information, please visit www.janetlevine.com.
Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/Livs-Secrets-Janet-Levine/dp/1956450505
Image Source:
- Photo by Ninno JackJr: Unsplash
