I am excited to have Candi with a guest post today ~ thanks to Rachel’s Random Resources for organizing.
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Genre: Historical fiction w romance
Publication Date: July 2025
Estimated Page Count: 270
Standalone Second Book in the Koba trilogy
Author Content Warning: Racist behaviour in the antagonists.
Purchase link: https://amzn.to/4mNCZOi
Guest post:
I thought I was writing a romance. You know, girl meets boy, a few obstacles to their love then happily ever after. But sometimes the story whispering sweet nothings in your ear, is fibbing. It’s not nothing. It’s sooo much bigger than you anticipated. And Romeo is wearing a bush hat and Juliet is in animal skins. They live in Africa, and the slight obstacles involve a racist government and a clandestine war.
And now you have to beg the family savings and set off for a remote area of Namibia to find out about these intriguing characters. You have to hire a four-wheel drive vehicle pulling a trailer with the water and fuel needed in the desert while you search for these nomads.
There were other challenges too: a charging bull elephant, a massive veld fire. But eventually I found a group of Ju|’hoan San people, (they referred to themselves as Bushmen) now thought by scientists to be the descendants of the world’s first people. They were small, slim-limbed, quick-witted and enchanting. I fell in love and wrote my first novel about them, Salt & Honey.
But I quickly discovered that their story is epic (it would be, with a lineage dating back to the dawn of modern humans, i.e. about 150 000 years.) Soon I had to write what happened next to my bush Juliet (Koba) and her Romeo (Mannie.) It’s in this book, Kalahari Passage, which I really hope you’ll dip into.
You see, 100% of my profits from book sales goes to a school feeding scheme I founded in 2017 to support the ‘paper’ education of Ju|’hoansi children. These kids have bush school, where their community teaches them traditional skills like hunting and gathering and then they have conventional school because their parents want them to become ‘paper people’- i.e. reading-writing literate. (See footage of my amazing experience teaching in these schools.) As a donor to the wider charity, the Ju|’hoansi Development Fund, my book sales have helped build two brand new schools to replace the tattered tent and rusty shipping container these kids used to call a classroom. My hope is that one day one of these children will be able to write their own story about their extraordinary people.
In the meantime, you’re stuck with me. But you may be pleased to know that the few San readers I’ve had thoroughly enjoyed the books. So, there is another Koba book in the pipeline, the final in the trilogy. It’s called Daughter of the Kalahari and I’m about half way through. Please reach out if you’re interested in being an advanced reader, and keep in touch with my views, news and philanthropy via my free newsletter on Substack.
Book blurb:
Koba and Mannie have been in jail. Their crime, loving each other across the Apartheid colour bar in southern Africa. Koba escapes her captors and using her bush skills, finds her way across the semi-desert to her former tribal home. But adapting to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle after a decade away, has challenges. And her mortal enemy is on her trail.
Meanwhile Mannie absconds during his parole and sets off on a sub-continental road trip to find his beloved Koba. But will his new comrades persuade him to join them across the border for training in deadly guerrilla warfare? And what will that mean for his future with Koba?
Under tragic circumstances the lovers meet, but the danger they are in means they face heart-breaking choices.
Kalahari Passage is an action-packed story of a search for identity and love. Readers will be spellbound by Koba’s world where an ancient culture dances, trances and lives in harmony with the land.
Key ideas
● Unique FMC from world’s oldest living culture, largely unknown outside anthropology. The lineage of Koba’s people goes back to the dawn of humankind.
● Dispossession – ancestral land, cultural identity, freedom
● Interracial love – romantic and family
● Racial discrimination and defiance
● Recent black history – Apartheid South Africa 1960s
Purchase Links
Kalahari Passage: https://mybook.to/7qAtkQA
Koba series: https://mybook.to/T81RWsf
Author Bio –
Candi Miller was born in southern Africa and has spent more than twenty years researching the first peoples of the region, a group who have now adopted the exonym of San or Bushmen. She taught creative writing at UK universities. She now lives in Cornwall where she is writing the last book of the Koba trilogy. She is republishing her novels to support a school feeding scheme she co-founded for San children in 2017.
Social Media Links –
https://candimiller.substack.com
Insta & TikTok @candimillerauthor
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100092417402759
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