Digging Stars: A Novel

by Novuyo Rosa Tshuma

Overview

A brilliant new novel from the award-winning author of House of Stone.

With admission to The Program, Rosa fulfills her dream to continue her father’s research on Bantu geometries and Indigenous astronomies. Yet since his death during her childhood, she has been plagued by anxiety attacks that she dubs “The Terrors”—and by unresolved questions about her father’s life. Who is his mysterious friend Mr. C? Who was her father, really?

Her cohort of talented Fellows includes Shaniqua, her roommate, studying melanin molecules and their capacity to conduct electricity in order to redefine how we think about race and biology; Richard, studying quantum mechanics; Mausi, focusing on Indigenous American scientific thought; and Peralte, a kind of stepbrother whose obsessive gaming has made him a programmer of virtual worlds—all of whom will challenge Rosa’s notions of ethnicity, identity, the ethics of technology, her adulation of her father, and what it means to be successful in America.

Full of philosophical provocation and gorgeous writing about space, Digging Stars is a brilliantly original reflection on meritocracy and the narrow notions of success that alienate us from the cosmos—a gravity-defying novel both about unlimited aspiration and the importance of being grounded.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781324035183
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	09/12/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	849 KB

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.
Novuyo Rosa Tshuma is the author of the award-winning novel House of Stone and a professor of fiction at Emerson College. A native of Zimbabwe, she lives in Boston, Massachusetts.

Editorial Reviews

"[Digging Stars] is a smart, incisive novel that blends a gripping coming-of-age story with a poignant story about loss, all the while asking us to consider: What compromises are we willing to make to achieve our highest ambitions and how much do we owe our own history?"

Weike Wang

"How to write a deeply felt, vividly imagined page-turner about Afrofuturism, astronomy, and astrobiology? Ask Novuyo Rosa Tshuma. Digging Stars is vital, ambitious, and reaches as high as the cosmos that inspire its characters’ lives and journeys. Pulsing with energy and mystery, this is a novel you won't soon forget."

Ayana Mathis

"Digging Stars is an extraordinarily unique portrait. The real stars of this canny undoing of the hubris of settler futurism are Novuyo Rosa Tshuma’s disarmingly brilliant words."

Namwali Serpell

"The layered nature of Digging Stars allows readers to uncover new ideas and emotions well into the book.… Tshuma traces multiple stories of family, immigration, and self-discovery into a thrilling and beautiful constellation."

BookPage

"An utterly remarkable novel of real ambition and heft by a truly significant young writer."

Chigozie Obioma

"In her second novel, following House of Stone (2019), Tshuma explores the effects of colonization and family disharmony, using astronomy as a metaphor and focal point to tell the story of a young Ndebele woman struggling to belong."

Booklist

"Novuyo Rosa Tshuma’s virtuosic, word-drunk sentences cast bridges across the abysses of history and the gaps between the stars. In Digging Stars, she chronicles a family’s fractures and a young woman’s determination to conquer the terrors of both outer and inner space. This is a brave and moving book."

Garth Greenwell

"Sumptuous, propulsive, and radiant. Novuyo Rosa Tshuma is unafraid to scale the stars. What a liberating thrill to read this book."

NoViolet Bulawayo

★ 2023-07-13
Zimbabwe-born Tshuma explores astrophysics and the politics of both Africa and the U.S. through the lens of a young physicist whose memories of her dead father have shaped her life.

In Athandwa Rosa Siziba’s memory, her father, Frank, is heroic: a renowned professor and astronomer who traveled to the International Space Station, a philosopher whose cryptic stories inspired as much as they mystified her. The hard truth is, Athandwa barely knew him. He moved to America shortly after her birth, leaving her with her mother in Zimbabwe. When she was 11—a year before he died—she paid her single visit to him in New York. The memory remains indelible 12 years later when she arrives to do graduate study in the same elite science program he attended. Soon her romantic notions of the U.S. are challenged by uncomfortable questions concerning race, political consciousness, and scientific ethics. In Zimbabwe, tribal membership categorized Athandwa’s identity, not the color of her skin. But as her new boyfriend points out, “Here in America, you’re Black.” (He himself is Haitian, the son of Frank’s former lover, and he too worshipped Frank.) Politics here can’t be separated from science. Expect to learn about fungi and Greek astronomy as well as Frank’s philosophic musings on Bantu geometries as an answer to what he called “Euclidean austerity.” Meanwhile, the issue of identity takes a different shape in the unsolved mystery of why an idealist scientist like Frank was closely connected to an obscenely rich military entrepreneur and a sinister Zimbabwean political operative. At heart Tshuma’s novel is about Athandwa’s personal struggle to find herself as “The Terrors” that have troubled her since Frank’s death build toward a crisis. Observant, ambitious, obedient, stubborn, also at times purposely oblivious—what a thorny mix she is.

Tshuma’s novel is cerebral yet passionate, a heady stew of science, family drama, and political intrigue.

Kirkus Reviews