What does Playboy have to do with Nabokov’s infamous novel Lolita and his obsession with a butterfly? Why is Shrien Dewani looking so cheap? And what can Ovid’s Metamorphosis show us about contemporary South African society? Imraan Coovadia’s Transformations: Essays is a collection of short pieces in the tradition of the essayist: exciting, probing, intelligent and readable. The essays are on writing, politics and culture from a South African perspective. Written with his signature wit, and with subjects ranging from vuvuzelas to J M Coetzee, Tolstoy to Mbeki, Coovadia’s essays cast a wide net and, like literature and the country, never fail to surprise.