House of Stone

by Novuyo Rosa Tshuma

Overview

Pulsing with wit, seduction, and dark humor, House of Stone is a masterful debut that explores the creative—and often destructive—act of history-making.

In the chronic turmoil of modern Zimbabwe, Abednego and Agnes Mlambo’s teenage son, Bukhosi, has gone missing, and the Mlambos fear the worst. Their enigmatic lodger, Zamani, seems to be their last, best hope for finding him. Since Bukhosi’s disappearance, Zamani has been preternaturally helpful: hanging missing posters in downtown Bulawayo, handing out fliers to passersby, and joining in family prayer vigils with the flamboyant Reverend Pastor from Agnes’s Blessed Anointings church. It’s almost like Zamani is part of the family…

But almost isn’t nearly enough for Zamani. He ingratiates himself with Agnes and feeds alcoholic Abednego’s addiction, desperate to extract their life stories and steep himself in borrowed family history, as keenly aware as any colonialist or power-mad despot that the one who controls the narrative inherits the future. As Abednego wrestles with the ghosts of his past and Agnes seeks solace in a deep-rooted love, their histories converge and each must confront the past to find their place in a new Zimbabwe.

Pulsing with wit, seduction, and dark humor, House of Stone is a sweeping epic that spans the fall of Rhodesia through Zimbabwe’s turbulent beginnings, exploring the persistence of the oppressed in a young nation seeking an identity, but built on forgetting.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393635423
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	01/29/2019
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Novuyo Rosa Tshuma is the author of the novel House of Stone, the winner of the 2019 Edward Stanford Travel Writing Award and the 2019 Bulawayo Arts Award for Outstanding Fiction. Her work has been shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the Balcones Fiction Prize. A native of Zimbabwe, she has lived in South Africa and the United States and has taught fiction workshops globally.

Editorial Reviews

…[a] remarkable first novel…Tshuma's brilliant layering of competing images and metaphors is one of the many marvels of this wise and demanding novel…Zamani's radical retelling of the past is a sublime performance of narrative possibilities—presented with an excess of love and violence that at times is almost too much to bear…Through Zamani, Tshuma shows us how much work it takes to efface the past, and, through House of Stone, she proves that those efforts are no match for a novel as ambitious and ingenious as this one.

The New York Times Book Review - Dinaw Mengestu

"To call [House of Stone] clever or ambitious is to do it a disservice—it is both, but also more than that…Tshuma is incapable of writing a boring sentence…By the end, she has managed to not only sum up Zimbabwean history, but also all of African colonial history: from devastating colonialism to the bitter wars of independence to the euphoria of self-rule and the disillusionment of the present. It is an extraordinary achievement for a first novel."

Guardian - Helon Habila

"With luminous language, Novuyo Rosa Tshuma explores the treacherous terrain of colonization and decolonization, remembering and forgetting, and love and betrayal. The result is a gripping account of revolution and its aftermath, both for a country and for one man."

Viet Thanh Nguyen

"Novuyo Tshuma is pure fire."

Garth Greenwell

"Tshuma’s brilliant layering of competing images and metaphors is one of the many marvels of this wise and demanding novel. . . . It’s a remarkable feat. . . . Tshuma shows us how much work it takes to efface the past, and, through House of Stone, she proves that those efforts are no match for a novel as ambitious and ingenious as this one."

Dinaw Mengestu

"Novuyo Rosa Tshuma has written a towering and multilayered gem. House of Stone is one of the greatest-ever novels about Zimbabwe. What a timely, resonant gift."

NoViolet Bulawayo

"Tshuma's writing is smart, original, feisty, brutal and gorgeous. She hits the perfect note on every single page in this gripping novel about history, belonging and power. This is the work of an incredible, incredible talent."

Chika Unigwe

"House of Stone is a novel of such maturity, such linguistic agility and scope that you’ll scarcely believe it’s a debut. Tshuma has set her formidable talents to no less a subject than the emergence of Zimbabwe from the darkness and tumult of colonialism. It’s fierce and energetic right to the end, and whip smart to boot."

Ayana Mathis

2018-11-26

Life under Robert Mugabe's brutal government takes center stage in this harrowing novel of Zimbabwe.

Seventeen-year-old Bukhosi Mlambo has been missing for more than a week, since his disappearance during a political rally. His parents, Abednego and Mama Agnes, desperate to find him, have accepted the emotional support and help of their tenant, Zamani, the unreliable narrator through whom the story is told. Zamani, an orphan, feeling a "prick of opportunity," takes advantage of their desperation and endeavors to replace Bukhosi and go from "surrogate son" to "son" through a variety of manipulative acts. As Zamani, who seems to live by the philosophy "that it's not what's true that matters, but what you can make true," unscrupulously attempts to cultivate an intimacy with the Mlambos, what results is a novel of confessions—some given freely, others pried through alcohol, drugs, and other means—family secrets, and an unflinching portrait of life in Zimbabwe before, during, and immediately after the Rhodesian Bush War. The wrath of the military commander dubbed Black Jesus, the Gukurahundi massacres—Tshuma's (Shadows, 2012) sprawling debut novel delves into these atrocities and others, and that history at times overwhelms the motivations and interiority of the central characters. Nonetheless, Tshuma delineates a rich and complicated tale about the importance of history ("Always, you must be looking back over your shoulder, to see what history is busy plotting for your future"), the price of revolution, the pursuit of freedom, and the remaking of one's self.

A multilayered, twisting, and surprising whirlwind of a novel that is as impressive as it is heartbreaking.

Kirkus Reviews

"Be prepared to laugh, shed tears, and marvel."

Vanity Fair - Yiyun Li

"Novuyo Rosa Tshuma’s epic satire House of Stone (2018) is driven by one Zamani’s almost pathological desire to replace the missing son of the Mlambo family. In Tshuma’s beautiful interweaving of personal and national history, we learn of successive generations burdened by sins of their fathers."

Guardian - Panashe Chigumadzi

"Tshuma’s House of Stone is a devastating and inviting piece of fiction that is earning its raves as a beyond notable first novel.… Her book slips like sand through fingers through time and voice, masterfully condensing the history of Zimbabwe to the point where the back story is informative and provocative but not cumbersome.… Tshuma deftly tells a story of colonization and decolonization both with a wide focus on the nation and the tight focus on a few people. The latter serves as a tragic microcosm of the former.… Her balance between the tightest and broadest focus is admirable and efficient."

Houston Chronicle - Andrew Dansby

"An enthralling novel that has it all: pathos, humour, and an insightful engagement with the history of Zimbabwe. With audacious style, Tshuma manages to step over the pitfalls that would swallow a lesser talent, and in so doing announces herself as a huge talent."

Brian Chikwava

"Reading House of Stone is like being punched in the stomach and tickled at the same time."

Ranka Primorac

"House of Stone is the novel devastated Zimbabwe needed to have written. Now Novuyo Tshuma has written it. Bayethe to her scintillating talent! In the most original and fearless prose I’ve read in years, Tshuma’s scheming narrator, Zamani, reveals the personal and political disintegration that was Zimbabwe’s undoing."

Tsitsi Dangarembga

"House of Stone is that rare thing, a truly original work of art whose author’s risk-taking pays off on the page. Zamani is a complex, compelling, and ambiguous narrator. Utterly stunning."

Tendai Huchu