🩷 My books
Books I’ve written
Straight answers for grown women. Bush mysteries for young readers. And a small teddy on a very important errand.
I write the books I go looking for and can’t find. That’s genuinely the whole method. 📖
For grown women
Hot, Tired, and Confused
The Straight-Talking Guide to Perimenopause — For Women Who Have Questions and Zero Patience for Vague Answers
One morning you wake up, and you’re fine. The next you’re awake at 3 am, convinced the house is too hot, your pillow has betrayed you, and you have somehow forgotten the word for ‘colander’.
You are not falling apart. Welcome to perimenopause — the life stage nobody put on the brochure.
I wrote this because I needed it and it didn’t exist. Everything I could find was either clinical and cold or vague and unhelpful, so I spent months in the research literature until I properly understood what was happening. Each chapter takes one symptom cluster — sleep, weight, brain fog, mood, hot flushes, relationships — explains what’s actually causing it, bins the advice that doesn’t work, and tells you what does. There’s a chapter on talking to your doctor too, because far too many women leave appointments feeling unheard.
Written in the sort of language you’d use with a person you actually liked. 🩷
160 pages · Kindle · R189 · free on Kindle Unlimited
🌅 The Bush Detectives
Mysteries for young readers, set on a South African game reserve. Zara Dlamini is eleven, lives on Thornfield where her dad is a ranger, and notices things other people miss. Her best friend Sipho can tell she’s solving a mystery before she’ll admit it. Tickles the vervet monkey usually agrees with Sipho.
Real African wildlife, real conservation, and a girl who refuses to accept an easy explanation. Every book ends with a Wild Fact about the animals in the story.
Bush Detectives · Book One
Zara and the Stolen Sunrise
Every morning on Thornfield, the darkness doesn’t just disappear — it retreats. It peels back from the horizon in layers: charcoal grey, then midnight blue, then a strip of purple, then orange.
This morning, the orange doesn’t come. The sun is late — and that never happens.
Zara has been awake since four, which on a safari reserve is practically lunchtime. She knows the bush’s ordinary quiet — the listening kind, the breathing kind, where you can feel it thinking. This is a different quiet entirely. She doesn’t know how she knows something is wrong. She just does.
14 chapters · for readers who love animals and adventure
Bush Detectives · Book Two
Zara and the Night the Leopard Vanished
The marula tree at the edge of the dry riverbed has belonged to Naledi for as long as Zara can remember. Every morning, in the fork of the second-highest branch, there she is — a leopard the colour of sunset and shadow. Tourists come from as far as Cape Town to see her. The guides call her the Queen of Thornfield.
This morning the branch is empty.
Everyone has a sensible explanation. Leopards move around. Even queens need to stretch their legs. But Zara has a feeling in her chest that is never wrong, and she is not prepared to accept an easy answer for an empty tree.
14 chapters · a longer mystery than Book One · out now
📖 Still to come on Thornfield
Book 3 — Zara and the River That Ran Dry
Book 4 — Zara and the Elephant That Remembered
Book 5 — Zara and the Fire on the Mountain
Picture book · bedtime
Tilly Teddy and the Moonbutton
The moon blinks three times… and nearly goes out.
Tilly is only a small teddy. She has one shiny blue button on her tummy and one empty spot where another button used to be. But the moon has lost her moonbutton, and without it the night will grow darker and darker — so when the toy chest opens onto a deep, sparkling forest, Tilly goes in. Even though she is frightened of the dark.
A gentle bedtime story about being small and going anyway. 🌙
16-page illustrated picture book
For everyone who has ever refused to believe an empty branch means nothing — keep looking. The truth is usually still out there, waiting to be found.
A bit about me
I’m Liz — a writer based in Rustenburg, an endurance athlete somewhere in the messy middle, and the person behind The Endurance Diaries, where I write about sport, movement, and the ongoing experience of being a person with a body that has opinions. 🚴♀️
I write for women who want a straight answer, for children who love animals and the wild open spaces of this country, and for small people who need a good story at bedtime. It’s a wider range than most authors have, and I’m quite fond of that.
If you’ve read one of these and enjoyed it, a review on Amazon genuinely helps. Reviews are how other readers find the books — and how Zara gets to keep having adventures. 🩷
Come and read the rest 🩷
Most of my writing lives here on the blog — training, Zwift, honest race recaps, and the unglamorous middle of endurance sport. There are trackers and training plans in the shop too.
🩷The Endurance Diaries🩷