We’re thrilled to announce that our July Book Club selection is This Mournable Body by Tsitsi Dangarembga, forthcoming from Graywolf Press on August 7, 2018, but available to Book Club members in just a few weeks!
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.
Madeleine Thien, author of Do Not Say We Have Nothing, writes:
Tsitsi Dangarembga’s work, begun thirty years ago with her masterpiece, Nervous Conditions, reaches a provocative and brilliant new height with this extraordinary novel. This Mournable Body demands answers from all who have suffered and survived the violence of the 21st century only to find history and injustice, cruelty and rebellion, woven into their souls. If all the doors are barred, can we still find our way free? “You are in a race,” Dangarembga writes, “with your very existence.”
Subscribe to the Rumpus Book Club by June 20 to join us in reading This Mournable Body, culminating in an exclusive online discussion with Tsitsi Dangarembga about the book!
