There is no document that explains how a braai works.
Nobody sat down and wrote the rules. There was no orientation, no handbook distributed at some point in your childhood, no formal induction into the system. And yet somehow every South African knows how they work.
You know who gets the tongs. You know that "now now" and "just now" are not the same thing, and that neither of them means now. You know that the meat will go on just now, which means it will go on at a time that cannot be predicted with any instrument currently available to science. You know that you will eat eventually. The timeline is unclear but the outcome is certain. None of this was taught to you. You absorbed it. You learned the physics of the world by being inside it.
A few weeks ago I asked what you read, and quite a number of you wrote back with a variation of the same request: more fantasy, please. So here we are. But first, bear with me while I talk about braais.
The thing that makes a braai work, really work as a social experience rather than just an outdoor cooking method, is that everyone present has agreed, without discussing it, to operate inside the same invisible world. The rules are not written down because they don't need to be. The world is complete enough that it runs itself. You walk in, you read it, you behave accordingly.
This is, more or less, exactly what a fantasy novelist does.
When Tolkien spent years constructing the languages, histories, and geography of Middle-earth before he wrote a single chapter of story, he was building the braai rules. When Brandon Sanderson designs a magic system with the rigour of a structural engineer, he's deciding who gets the tongs, and why, and what happens if someone touches them without permission. When Ursula K. Le Guin builds a world of permanent, brutal winter whose people have no fixed gender, she's asking you to walk into a space that runs on different physics, trust that it's internally consistent, and behave accordingly.
Fantasy gets a slightly unfair reputation as escapism. As if the people reading it are running away from something.
I think the opposite is closer to the truth. Fantasy readers are people who are exceptionally good at entering an unfamiliar world and learning its rules from the inside. They don't need everything explained upfront. They're willing to arrive before the fire is ready, figure out where to stand, and trust that the whole thing will make sense by the time the food is on the table.
That's not escapism. That's a particular kind of readerly courage.
And it's one I want to take more seriously in this shop.
The readers here are wider and more varied than the shelves have been reflecting. Fantasy belongs here, alongside the crime and the memoir and the South African literature and the poetry that apparently 40% of you are reading quietly and I think that's wonderful. It belongs here not as a concession to a different kind of reader, but because the readers who are already here are exactly the kind of people who know how to step into a world that runs on rules nobody wrote down.
I'm going to be stocking more fantasy. If you have titles you've been hunting, or authors you want to see on these shelves, write to me. I am, as always, taking requests: info@thestorystation.co.za
PS: A good fantasy novel will rearrange something small in the way you see the actual world. That's not nothing. That's rather a lot, actually.