Books set in Zimbabwe (22)
Find more books set in Zimbabwe by genre:
Historical fiction
Feminism
Contemporary fiction
Political
Adult
Romance
Essay
Psychology
Short story
1.
Avenues by Train by Farai Mudzingwa EN
ZimbabweDescription:
When seven-year-old Jedza witnesses a tragic incident involving a train and the death of his close boyhood friend in his hometown Miner’s Drift, he is convinced that his life is haunted. Now in his mid-20s, Jedza is a down-and-out electrician, moving to Harare in the hopes that he will escape the darkness and superstitions of the small town. But living in the shadowy restless atmosphere of the Avenues with its mysterious pools of water rising under msasa trees, he is tormented by the disappearance of his sister and their early encounters with ancestral spirits, the shapeshifting power of the n... continue
2.
Description:
Bones is a powerful, heart-rending novel that provides a sensitive evocation of Marita, a farm worker, whose only son joined the freedom fighters in Zimbabwes war of liberation. He does not return after the war and Marita is determined to find him or find out what happened to him. This is perhaps a single clear theme in a landscape where women, particularly the poor and the marginalised, suffer many layers of oppression. Maritas courage and endurance are reconstructed through the memories of those who knew her in a language steep in poetry and Shona idiom. Bones, which won the Noma Award in 19... continue
3.
Butterfly Burning by Yvonne Vera EN
Description:
Butterfly Burning brings the brilliantly poetic voice of Zimbabwean writer Yvonne Vera to American readers for the first time. Set in Makokoba, a black township, in the late l940s, the novel is an intensely bittersweet love story.
4.
Condiciones nerviosas by Tsitsi Dangarembga ES
Description:
Condiciones nerviosas es una de las obras maestras de la literatura africana contemporánea. Tambu, una campesina pobre de Zimbabue, pertenece, como la autora misma, a la generación que, entre la infancia y la primera juventud, asistió al tramo final de las luchas contra el régimen de la minoría blanca que culminan, en 1980, con la formación del primer gobierno negro. La lucha de Tambu por acceder a una buena educación simboliza la trayectoria de una colectividad nacional que conoce cambios profundos en la transición entre las incertidumbres de la lucha contra el colonialismo y las incertidumbr... continue
5.
Drinking from Graveyard Wells by Yvette Lisa Ndlovu EN
Description:
"Even in death, who has ownership over Black women's bodies?" Questions like this lurk between the lines of this stunning collection of stories that engage with African women's histories, both personal and generational. Their history is not just one thing: there is heartbreak and pain, and joy, and flying and magic, so much magic. An avenging spirit takes on the patriarchy from beyond the grave. An immigrant woman undergoes a naturalization ceremony in an imagined American state that demands that immigrants pay a toll of the thing they love the most. A first-generation Zimbabwean-American woma... continue
6.
Description:
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2022 BOOKER PRIZE From the award-winning author of the Booker Prize finalist We Need New Names, an anthropomorphic blockbuster of a novel that chronicles the fall of an oppressive regime, and the chaotic, kinetic potential for real liberation that rises in its wake. Glory centres around the unexpected fall of Old Horse, a long-serving, tyrannical leader of the fictional country of Jidada, and the drama that follows for a rumbustious nation of animals on the precarious path to freedom. Inspired by the unexpected fall by coup, in November 2017, of Robert Mugabe—Zimbabwe’s pres... continue
7.
Harvest of Thorns by Shimmer Chinodya EN
Description:
The 1990 Commonwealth Writers Regional Prize voted Harvest of Thorns the winner in the Best Book category. Harvest of Thorns tells the story of Benjamin Tichafa who grows up in Rhodesia in the 1960s. From a conservative, religious family, but exposed to the heady ideas of the black nationalist movements, the young student is pulled in different directions. Isolated and troubled at boarding school, he is provoked into leaving, making his way to Mozambique, and joining the freedom fighters. There, in the crucible of a bitter civil war of liberation, the young man develops into manhood. Returning... continue
8.
House of Hunger by Dambudzo Marechera EN
Description:
Winner of the Guardian Fiction Prize, 1979 and first published in 1978, The House of Hunger is a selection of interconnected short stories that tell of Zimbabwe in chaos. In a style somewhat reminiscent of Joyce's Dubliners, the stories deal with psychological and social alienation. Dambudzo Marechera's work is not material typically associated with African literature. His stories are psychologically, rather than politically, motivated as his depictions of living in exile and outsiderhood show.
9.
House of Stone by Novuyo Rosa Tshuma EN
Description:
Winner of the Edward Stanford Prize for Fiction with a Sense of Place; 2019Longlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize; 2019Longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize; 2019__________'Easily the best debut I've read this year; Tshuma's novel is both hilarious and horrifying; filled with compassion; anger and despair. [Her] unreliable narrator [is] of the kind that deserves to be remembered up there with Humbert Humbert' Kim Evans; Culturefly__________Bukhosi has gone missing. His father; Abed; and his mother; Agnes; cling to the hope that he has run away; rather than been murdered by government thugs. ... continue
10.
