Recommendations from our site
“This is part of a trilogy that Dangarembga began 30 years ago. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize last year. I really wanted it to win. It’s the third book of the trilogy which tells the story of a character called Tambudzai, whom we meet as a really bright girl living in colonial Rhodesia in the first book, Nervous Conditions. At one point, Tambu thinks she could be anything she wanted to be. But that’s an impossible dream in pre-independence Zimbabwe. And then you have This Mournable Body, which is set after independence, where everything is just getting corrupted and relentlessly going wrong.” Read more...
The best books on Human Rights and Literature
Lyndsey Stonebridge, Literary Scholar
“A haunting and heartbreaking novel. It features the breakdown of the female protagonist as well as the breakdown of the country, and the ways in which they are linked. It’s written in an unusual second-person style, which is kind of cinematic and works brilliantly. It’s both an intimate story and a universal story: about an intelligent person having to deal with, and being enmeshed in, the mediocrity of what’s around her, the injustices, and yet having to keep going somehow through it all.” Read more...
The Best Fiction of 2020: The Booker Prize Shortlist
Margaret Busby, Publisher
