Harare Review of Books, July 2023

Aug 01, 2023

Hello!

Busy, busy, busy.

Recently on the blog

This fever dream of a story spun my head and left me with upside-down impressions of the inhabitants of and happenings in an African village in rural Australia. Bacon uses surrealism to tell the story of Ch’anzu, who loses hir wife and job on the same day. Zie ends up in Serengotti, a village for people who have escaped violence and trauma, where zie’s been employed to create an entertainment experience that will help bring healing to the villagers. [More]

This is a book about families, migration and the Caribbean, set at the time of Hurricane Maria, with flashbacks to mid-century Dominica. Hector Peterson travels back from the US to Dominica with his father to lay his mother to rest, and on that trip he tries to learn about his parents’ hidden history there, and to process the mistakes he’s made in his own life. [More]

This is an enjoyable YA SFF read that’s not afraid to tackle exciting concepts or complicated personal issues. Among the things Michael Grothaus brings up in Beautiful Shining People: body dysmorphia, gender, AI, the personhood of artificial people, the new Cold War (China vs the US), cyberattacks, and the dominance of multinational cyber-companies. All of this set in a futuristic, cyberpunk Japan, which he brings to vivid and colourful life with amazing world-building and complete immersion in the mechanics of how such a society would work and still be steeped in old and present Japanese tradition and culture. [More]

If you read “Cat Person” and Me and Bad Art Friend, and came away with musings about the personal rights of muses, this book wants to explore some of those ideas with you. [More]

I’ll read any fiction from one of my favourite authors, Angola-born, Mozambique-based writer José Eduardo Agualusa. He and his wonderful translator, Daniel Hahn, have a way with words, the fantastical and the surreal, bringing ghosts to life with dry humour, and immersing us in alternate cosmologies, showing us other ways the world might be. Agualusa’s treatment of Angola’s history is always slightly farcical, very humorous, and also quite sad, which seems appropriate to histories of liberation movements in Africa. [More]

I am full of appreciation for this book, the first I’ve read from a Saharawi writer—Sara Cheikh’s non-fiction account of her return to “the desert” and her home right at the beginning of the Covid pandemic. She left Western Sahara as a young child, migrating to Spain with her family, and although she has returned briefly in-between, she is now both a Westerner and yet still Saharawi, something she explores in this memoir. [More]

I especially love that the collection blends the sensibility of Western fairytales (because yes, we all grew up on those) with West African mythology and cosmology, making this collection a possible future for African fantasy, which is really exciting. It’s also wonderful how Ogundiran accesses his experiences and memories in his writing, which he elaborates on in the story notes and author note at the back of the book. [More]

An epic and complicated read, this is the story of a family across generations, anchored on Zakariya, his adopted brother Hanna, and their sister, Souad, in the Syria of the early 1900s to 1950s. It starts with a terrible flood that washes most of a village away, altering the lives of the survivors. Through a complicated timeline, we are immersed into the lives of the three, and those connected to them, as well as the life of Aleppo and nearby villages, the region, and Europe. [More]

What an absolute pleasure this book was to read, like sitting with a friend as she talked about people she knows. Set in India and the US, this is a collection of stories about families, and couples, and children, about migrants, and about those they left behind. Bhanoo’s writing effortlessly straddles the divide between India and its diaspora, and there is representation of different Indian subcultures, of tradition and modernity, social and economic change in India (some of it driven by that diaspora), as well as an achingly beautiful feminist story. [More]

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There’s more on the blog; this was a big month.

And then, you’ll have got the TBR for the second half of 2023 post in your inboxes if you’re a subscriber. If not, you’ll find it here.

The earlier post with reads for roughly the first half of the year is here.

Other things I’ve been doing

New readers may not be aware that I talk books over at The Continent

and The Sunday Long Read

I also wrote a fan letter for Obsidian in the latest SLR

Even famous Zimbabwean writer Farai Mudzingwa is starting to agree with me:

Happening in books

You can also now find book news here! Happening in Books — An HRB Book News Feed

Twitterer (Xerer simply doesn’t have the same ring to it) Anne Eboso shared literary events happening in NBO:
The Great Nnedi sold a book, can’t wait to read:
Applications for the Miles Morland Foundation Foundation are open until September 18, 2023.

The MMF annually awards a small number of Morland Writing Scholarships, with the aim being to allow each Scholar the time to produce the first draft of a completed book. The Scholarships are open to anyone writing in the English language who was born in Africa, or both of whose parents were born in Africa.
Scholars writing fiction will receive a grant of **£18,000**, paid monthly over the course of twelve months.
At the discretion of the Foundation, Scholars writing non-fiction, who require additional research time, could receive an additional grant, paid over a period of up to eighteen months.
Miles Morland Foundation Writing Scholarship - Commonwealth Foundation

The Shirley Jackson Awards are given for the best work published in the literature of horror. The latest award ceremony was held on July 5, 2023. You can check out the winners here: The Shirley Jackson Awards
The Sunday Times Literary Awards longlist is out. Here’s the fiction longlist, which will be judged by Ekow Duker, Kevin Ritchie, and Prof. Nomboniso Gasa:
- In The Shadow of the Springs I Saw by Barbara Adair (Modjaji Books)
- The Heist Men by Andrew Brown (Penguin Fiction)
- How to be a Revolutionary by CA Davids (Umuzi)
- Stirring the Pot by Quraisha Dawood (Penguin Fiction)
- The Man Who Loved Crocodile Tamers by Finuala Dowling (Kwela)
- The Dao of Daniel by Lodewyk G du Plessis and translated by Michiel Heyns (Tafelberg)
- Chasing Marian by Amy Heydenrych, Qarnita Loxton, Pamela Power and Gail Schmillel (Pan Macmillan)
- Peaches and Smeets by Ashti Juggath (Modjaji Books)
- Two Tons o’ Fun by Fred Khumalo (Umuzi)
- Notes on Falling by Bronwyn Law-Viljoen (Umuzi)
- It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way by Alistair Mackay (Kwela)
- The Daughters of Nandi by Nokuthula Mazibuko Msimang (Paivapo)
- The Second Verse by Onke Mazibuko (Penguin Fiction)
- Things My Mother Left Me by Pulane Mlilo Mpondo (Blackbird Books)
- Across the Kala Pani by Shevlyn Mottai (Penguin Fiction)
- The Quality of Mercy by Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu (Penguin Fiction)
- Hammerman: A Walking Shadow by Mike Nicol (Umuzi)
- An Angel’s Demise by Sue Nyathi (Pan Macmillan)
- An Unusual Grief by Yewanda Omotoso (Jonathan Ball Publishers/Cassava Republic Press)
- The Eye of the Beholder by Margie Orford (Jonathan Ball Publishers)
- In The Midst of it All by Thabile Shange (Kwela)
- A Dalliance with Destiny by Aman Singh Maharaj (Austin Macauley Fiction)
- A Library to Flee by Etienne van Heerden and translated by Henrietta Rose-Innes (Tafelberg)
- Red Tide by Irma Venter and translated by Karin Schimke (Tafelberg)
- Elton Baatjies by Lester Walbrugh (Karavan Press)
- The Other Me by Joy Watson (Karavan Press)
- The Errors of Dr Browne by Mark Winkler (Umuzi)