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This Mournable Body

Audiobook
Fiction: Literary
Unabridged   11.5 hour(s)
Publication date: 08/07/2018

This Mournable Body

A Novel

Available from major retailers or BUY FROM AMAZON
Audio CD ISBN:9781684410361
Digital Download ISBN:9781684410378

Summary

In This Mournable Body, Tsitsi Dangarembga returns to the protagonist of her acclaimed first novel, Nervous Conditions, to examine how the hope and potential of a young girl and a fledgling nation can sour over time and become a bitter and floundering struggle for survival.

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Product Description

Anxious about her prospects after leaving a stagnant job, Tambudzai finds herself living in a run-down youth hostel in downtown Harare. For reasons that include her grim financial prospects and her age, she moves to a widow’s boarding house and eventually finds work as a biology teacher. But at every turn in her attempt to make a life for herself, she is faced with a fresh humiliation, until the painful contrast between the future she imagined and her daily reality ultimately drives her to a breaking point.

In This Mournable Body, Tsitsi Dangarembga returns to the protagonist of her acclaimed first novel, Nervous Conditions, to examine how the hope and potential of a young girl and a fledgling nation can sour over time and become a bitter and floundering struggle for survival. As a last resort, Tambudzai takes an ecotourism job that forces her to return to her parents’ impoverished homestead. It is this homecoming, in Dangarembga’s tense and psychologically charged novel, that culminates in an act of betrayal, revealing just how toxic the combination of colonialism and capitalism can be.

Reviews/Praise

“Ojo’s performance succeeds when there is an indelibility, an authenticity to accents, places and peoples. She shines when she gives voice to the many female characters in the novel. She is wonderfully subtle and confident in bringing them to life in what is a novel of darkness and pain.” —SoundCommentary

“A haunting, incisive, and timely glimpse into how misogyny and class strife shape life in post-colonial Zimbabwe.”―Kirkus Reviews

“The novel explores how race, gender, class, and age are at play in Zimbabwe, and the overwhelming strength of these forces in the face of even the most optimistic and ambitious women.”―Vanity Fair

“Heartbreaking and piercing. . . . This is a smartly told novel of hard-earned bitterness and disillusionment.”―Publishers Weekly

Author Bio

Tsitsi Dangarembga is the author of two previous novels, including Nervous Conditions, winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. She is also the director of the Institute of Creative Arts for Progress in Africa Trust. She lives in Harare, Zimbabwe.