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Shamiso
Shamiso is a young girl, thoughtful but uncertain, taken by her family from rural Zimbabwe to bustling Harare. As she grows up there, she watches the her distant, stern father, her angry stepmother and her father’s strange, loving cousin, the elderly Jimson, who encourages Shamiso to discover her passion for art, her place in their family, and her voice in the world.
When she takes a leap to leave Zimbabwe behind for Brighton, England, Shamiso must find a new family and a new way of living. There she falls in love for the first time with George – whose female identity, Georgie, is everything Shamiso has ever wanted or needed. But can such happiness last, when neither of them knows yet who they truly are?
Quirky, challenging and mischievous, this tender coming-of-age story brilliantly examines selfhood, love and the many shapes family can take. From first moments to final steps, Shamiso is a thought-provoking, blazing work of modern existence and all its contradictions.
When she takes a leap to leave Zimbabwe behind for Brighton, England, Shamiso must find a new family and a new way of living. There she falls in love for the first time with George – whose female identity, Georgie, is everything Shamiso has ever wanted or needed. But can such happiness last, when neither of them knows yet who they truly are?
Quirky, challenging and mischievous, this tender coming-of-age story brilliantly examines selfhood, love and the many shapes family can take. From first moments to final steps, Shamiso is a thought-provoking, blazing work of modern existence and all its contradictions.
- GenresContemporary
168 pages, Hardcover
Published January 1, 2025
70 people want to read
About the author
Brian Chikwava
8 books13 followersBrian Chikwava is a Zimbabwean writer and musician. His short story "Seventh Street Alchemy" was awarded the 2004 Caine Prize for African writing in English; Chikwava became the first Zimbabwean to do so. He has been a Charles Pick fellow at the University of East Anglia, and lives in London. He continues to write in England and put out an album titled Jacaranda Skits.
Chikwava won the fifth Caine Prize for African Writing in 2004 with his short story "Seventh Street Alchemy" (which was published in Writing Still, Weaver Press, Harare, 2003),the first Zimbabwean to win the prize. Making the award, the chair of the judges, Alvaro Ribeiro, described the story as: "A very strong narrative in which Brian Chikwava of Zimbabwe claims the English language as his own, and English with African characteristics.... A triumph for the long tradition of Zimbabwe writing in the face of Zimbabwe’s uncertain future!"
Chikwava won the fifth Caine Prize for African Writing in 2004 with his short story "Seventh Street Alchemy" (which was published in Writing Still, Weaver Press, Harare, 2003),the first Zimbabwean to win the prize. Making the award, the chair of the judges, Alvaro Ribeiro, described the story as: "A very strong narrative in which Brian Chikwava of Zimbabwe claims the English language as his own, and English with African characteristics.... A triumph for the long tradition of Zimbabwe writing in the face of Zimbabwe’s uncertain future!"
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May 25, 2025Until now, I don't think I've ever read anything from Zimbabwe, so this was a welcome change. If anyone knows of any editions dedicated to African literature, please let me know. As for the novel itself, I found it neither exceptional nor disappointing. I appreciated learning about aspects of Zimbabwean culture. For example, the language spoken there lacks gendered pronouns, so when referring to elders, Chikwava uses the singular "they" in English. This also makes for interesting reading, as there is also a genderqueer or non-binary character. What bothered me were the characters who came and went without much ado. This made for a rather scattered narrative, or at least it appeared that way to my muddled brain.
October 13, 2025
Thank you to Canongates for the gifted physical copy.
From rural Zimbabwe to Harare to Brighton, Shamiso’s journey is one of identity, family, and finding herself far from home.
I was genuinely excited to dive into this book — and once I started, I couldn’t stop. But not because I was hooked… more because I was trying (and failing) to understand what exactly was happening with Shamiso, Jimson, George, and her family.
By the end, I found myself asking “What did I just read?” The relationship between Shamiso and George, in particular, left me completely puzzled.
Honestly, I almost didn’t write a review because I finished the book with so many conflicting feelings. I felt disconnected — from the story, from the characters, from the emotion it was trying to convey.
Thank you once again for the physical copy.
From rural Zimbabwe to Harare to Brighton, Shamiso’s journey is one of identity, family, and finding herself far from home.
I was genuinely excited to dive into this book — and once I started, I couldn’t stop. But not because I was hooked… more because I was trying (and failing) to understand what exactly was happening with Shamiso, Jimson, George, and her family.
By the end, I found myself asking “What did I just read?” The relationship between Shamiso and George, in particular, left me completely puzzled.
Honestly, I almost didn’t write a review because I finished the book with so many conflicting feelings. I felt disconnected — from the story, from the characters, from the emotion it was trying to convey.
Thank you once again for the physical copy.
August 19, 2025
We fall into uneasy silence. The words were beautifully delivered, but I’m unsure what they mean. And I don’t trust George to know what it means to love, to commit to meeting another person’s expectations and needs. Does George understand that people you claim to love feel betrayed when you fail to meet their expectations? Failure of that kind takes one through a bleak landscape of guilt and, sometimes, grief that will make you want to add to the books of the Bible. The book of Babamukuru Jimson?
But the more I think about it, the more I feel silly. Silly because I’m afraid of resetting how my head is wired, afraid to lose myself and forget all I know. Silly because it is undeniable now that when I thought I could be George’s transition object, I was standing on my head. Here I am with George, River God, flowing in and out of forms, a multitude whose variability I can only follow so far. I can’t yet free myself and flow to where I’m best placed to receive and give love
Written by a London based, Zimbabwean author and musician – this is a distinctive and enjoyable second novel.
Its first party titular narrator is a girl from Zimbabwe – and we learn first of her life there. Her father was rounded up when eighteen to fight the war in Mozambique – returning to his rural village, fluent in mandarin and as a “terrorist who became a liberator overnight”, eventually joining the Civil Service (where he meets Shamiso’s mother – another ex-combatant).
Whereas she falls into poverty (he rejects her when she becomes pregnant and she starts selling herself to long distance truck drivers) he works his way up into the new Zimbabwe - and eventually gets his daughter bought back to him by his cousin, the oddly compelling but eccentric elder figure of Jimson (addressed as “they” in accordance with Shona tradition).
After learning more of Shamiso’s time in her home country – which provides a fascinating insight into a changing country and culture, one her father continues to succeed in – her skills carving Shona gods wins her a scholarship at Brighton and the second and longer section of the novel has as its centre her complex relationship with the gender-fluid Georgie, adopted child of a mixed black/Ugandan Indian couple who first house Shamiso – both trying to understand their own identity and struggling with that of the other. Meanwhile her father continues his rise – eventually becoming an MP for Mugabe’s party,
Scatterings throughout of untranslated Shona (mainly referring to family positions or honorifics but also what I think is a slightly longer fragment of poetry) and references to Shona totems and gods – add a deeper layer and complexity to the novel and I think reinforce its most crucial message – that language and world view are intimately connected.
Between a Booker longlist which this year majored on the international nature of its longlist but which despite the judging panel ignored the continent of Africa, and an International Booker Prize which due to its insistence on translation tends to only ever include Francophone Africa I think this was a book which should have gathered more attention and I hope some it does get some prize recognition – not least as I would be interested to understand more of a novel which at times I think was a little too far removed from own experiences for me to appreciate what it was doing.
My thanks to Canongate for an ARC via NetGalley
I’m ready to leave the country, leave Europe. Escape European languages, their highly gendered grammatical structures that simplify so much you can slice a black woman without seeing what you’re doing. The disciplinary committee will think I’m insane, but they’re thinking people; they will understand when I say Africans become homophobes when they learn to speak European languages, that they love the macho far-right Western politicians when they cease to see that we prioritised other categorisations over gender until we learnt to speak European languages. They must understand that languages produce different worlds.
October 12, 2025
“Obese with grief, I discovered that ‘I love you’ was the best sentence ever.”
I’m one of the vanishingly few Zimbabweans who’s never been to Harare North (what we call the UK in local—Zimbabwean—parlance), but Chikwava’s first novel of that name showed me vividly what that experience was like for many of my compatriots—those who became undocumented migrants there. In some ways, *Shamiso* is a much more polished rewrite of that novel—a similar experience for Shamiso as Harare North’s protagonist’s, but Shamiso’s is much less fraught, and far less brutal.
Right from the beginning, *Shamiso* roots itself and announces itself to be a novel steeped in Zimbabwean life and culture. It’s in descriptions of how when children are going to fight, they build little mounds of soil and call them ‘your mother’s breast’ before kicking them over; and it’s in how, as Chikwava says, you name your dog to fight with your neighbours:
“The puppy has been named Mapenzi. Morons! It is custom to conduct sprawling, decades-long quarrels by giving your pets names that wind up the hated neighbours. Whenever anyone from Shadreck’s family comes to borrow one thing or another, Jimson’s mother never misses the opportunity to pretend to be calling Mapenzi at the top of her voice.”
Chikwava’s a lyricist, with his beautiful way with words—the main way *Shamiso* works its strange magic. His prose soars. The eponymous Shamiso says:
“I am still the little girl who spent a chunk of her childhood trying to find her way out of capacious clothes that I was expected to grow into. If my grasp of the world was behind everyone else’s, it’s because I saw it later than many.
You could say I was the last to see the blue sky. I could start the story there. But I will start here: with Jimson at the borehole.”
Jimson, the “old man made of sadza, sweet potatoes, groundnuts and black-eyed peas. My Babamukuru.” I loved that tragic figure, the ostracised and lonely orphan Shamiso’s initial friend and confidant, with whom she was always getting up to shenanigans early on. Jimson, who murdered someone in their youth, who vanished to Mozambique where they spent eleven years travelling “through worlds in which you have to sleep very fast because somebody else needs the pillow.” Jimson, of gravitas in the cultural sense, a hero in the village for their stories of travel in exotic lands. Jimson who “never married, never reproduced” and was “destined to be buried with a maize cob, the symbolic wife for a man who dies wifeless”—but was also “the most senior surviving man from Shamiso’s father’s line, and nothing can be done about that.”
But in the end, Jimson never went to war and so cannot be a national hero as Shamiso’s father, their cousin, is. “They are new men and women at their homecoming. They speak foreign tongues, have new names and walk with the signature gait of people with a new way of looking. The confidence of the terrorist who became a liberator overnight.” Their cousin, Shamiso’s father has “acquired the volatile temperament of young men who have seen war, lost comrades or terminated friends’ lives and become monsters”; he “has been turned inside out often; it’s impossible to tell which way he is now.”
Jimson, overawed. Never living up, then, to what the new Zimbabwe requires. If their status in the city at their cousin’s house and at the hands of their cousin’s wife becomes humiliating, this is what they must try to accept for them to live. Even if this leads to Shamiso’s disenchantment with them. Even if it leads to tragedy.
I loved this, too: the comfort and profundity of the use of the pronoun ‘they’ for elders, customary in many southern African cultures. I believe this is the first book I’ve read in English that does this. The meaning of this is respect for the length of their lives: We refer to elders in the plural as acknowledgement that they are greater than us in wisdom and knowledge. Mostly, in this novel, this respect is given (on and off; pronouns shift and change) to Jimson.
Shamiso means, in ChiShona, a marvel or a wonder. Part of the novel’s strange magic is rooted in spirit. Our protagonist’s first encounter with her spirituality is when Babamukuru Jimson buys her a Nyami Nyami pendant. Gradually, her connection to this snake-headed fish spirit grounds her and gives her courage and a connection to her Babamukuru:
“Babamukuru Jimson was never far away, but I no longer needed him to be there for me to stand up to my stepmother. As long as I could feel him through the pendant, I could hold onto my inner stillness.”
Shamiso becomes haunted. She has what Western medicine would interpret as a breakdown, but what in Shamiso’s own cosmology is a breakthrough to the spiritual world and her ancestors. In some of the novel’s best passages, Shamiso comes to herself to find she has walked 75 km towards the eastern part of Zimbabwe, where her ancestors dwell. She completes the trip by bus and treks up a sacred mountain when she gets there to commune with the spirits. She finds something there, coming away finally with a sense of self and with the determination not to lose her mind.
It’s important to note that this section introduced for me a severely discordant note, as the Nyami Nyami spirit belongs to the Tonga people of the west of Zimbabwe, whereas Shamiso is shown to be rooted in Chimanimani, in the east. The spirits of the various Zimbabwean cosmologies are geographical and belong to particular nations; I don’t believe, then, that Nyami Nyami could make a meaningful connection with Shamiso, or Shamiso with them. As Nyami Nyami becomes a central theme of the novel, it did rather puzzle me that Chikwava made this choice.
Nevertheless, it’s also in this part where the novel acquires a more surreal feel; from this point on, Shamiso is a somewhat less reliable narrator; the goings-on in her life acquire a layer of mystery, and the story becomes more meditative and filled with imagery from the art Babamukuru taught Shamiso to make.
When she’s eighteen, Shamiso is thrust into and welcomes the freedom it gives her to be away from her family and culture: She has won a scholarship to art school in the UK. This is also the section of the novel that, to me, recollects and reimagines *Harare North*. In the UK, Shamiso finds care and attention in the home of Nishta and Gabriel, who’ve taken her in. She meets George who is, in many ways, her soulmate. Shamiso learns boldness. Her world is much-expanded as a result of her transplantation to this new culture, and she embraces it all. Still haunted and revisited by the traumas of her childhood, she still finds a way to a kind of peace. And now, more than ever, her life is threaded through with and grounded in Nyami Nyami, the snake spirit.
If Shamiso as a sculptor learns to use the subtractive technique, it feels like Chikwava may have, too, in the writing of this novel, “[removed] material from a block until something … [emerged]… [not] imposing form but anticipating.’ We don’t come to the end of Shamiso’s journey; it’s hard to know where she’ll end up. But perhaps that doesn’t matter: We’ve seen her through to yet another beginning by the end of the novel. What she’ll make of it, we can only guess.
A book well worth reading, and recommended. Many thanks to Brian Chikwava for the review copy.
I’m one of the vanishingly few Zimbabweans who’s never been to Harare North (what we call the UK in local—Zimbabwean—parlance), but Chikwava’s first novel of that name showed me vividly what that experience was like for many of my compatriots—those who became undocumented migrants there. In some ways, *Shamiso* is a much more polished rewrite of that novel—a similar experience for Shamiso as Harare North’s protagonist’s, but Shamiso’s is much less fraught, and far less brutal.
Right from the beginning, *Shamiso* roots itself and announces itself to be a novel steeped in Zimbabwean life and culture. It’s in descriptions of how when children are going to fight, they build little mounds of soil and call them ‘your mother’s breast’ before kicking them over; and it’s in how, as Chikwava says, you name your dog to fight with your neighbours:
“The puppy has been named Mapenzi. Morons! It is custom to conduct sprawling, decades-long quarrels by giving your pets names that wind up the hated neighbours. Whenever anyone from Shadreck’s family comes to borrow one thing or another, Jimson’s mother never misses the opportunity to pretend to be calling Mapenzi at the top of her voice.”
Chikwava’s a lyricist, with his beautiful way with words—the main way *Shamiso* works its strange magic. His prose soars. The eponymous Shamiso says:
“I am still the little girl who spent a chunk of her childhood trying to find her way out of capacious clothes that I was expected to grow into. If my grasp of the world was behind everyone else’s, it’s because I saw it later than many.
You could say I was the last to see the blue sky. I could start the story there. But I will start here: with Jimson at the borehole.”
Jimson, the “old man made of sadza, sweet potatoes, groundnuts and black-eyed peas. My Babamukuru.” I loved that tragic figure, the ostracised and lonely orphan Shamiso’s initial friend and confidant, with whom she was always getting up to shenanigans early on. Jimson, who murdered someone in their youth, who vanished to Mozambique where they spent eleven years travelling “through worlds in which you have to sleep very fast because somebody else needs the pillow.” Jimson, of gravitas in the cultural sense, a hero in the village for their stories of travel in exotic lands. Jimson who “never married, never reproduced” and was “destined to be buried with a maize cob, the symbolic wife for a man who dies wifeless”—but was also “the most senior surviving man from Shamiso’s father’s line, and nothing can be done about that.”
But in the end, Jimson never went to war and so cannot be a national hero as Shamiso’s father, their cousin, is. “They are new men and women at their homecoming. They speak foreign tongues, have new names and walk with the signature gait of people with a new way of looking. The confidence of the terrorist who became a liberator overnight.” Their cousin, Shamiso’s father has “acquired the volatile temperament of young men who have seen war, lost comrades or terminated friends’ lives and become monsters”; he “has been turned inside out often; it’s impossible to tell which way he is now.”
Jimson, overawed. Never living up, then, to what the new Zimbabwe requires. If their status in the city at their cousin’s house and at the hands of their cousin’s wife becomes humiliating, this is what they must try to accept for them to live. Even if this leads to Shamiso’s disenchantment with them. Even if it leads to tragedy.
I loved this, too: the comfort and profundity of the use of the pronoun ‘they’ for elders, customary in many southern African cultures. I believe this is the first book I’ve read in English that does this. The meaning of this is respect for the length of their lives: We refer to elders in the plural as acknowledgement that they are greater than us in wisdom and knowledge. Mostly, in this novel, this respect is given (on and off; pronouns shift and change) to Jimson.
Shamiso means, in ChiShona, a marvel or a wonder. Part of the novel’s strange magic is rooted in spirit. Our protagonist’s first encounter with her spirituality is when Babamukuru Jimson buys her a Nyami Nyami pendant. Gradually, her connection to this snake-headed fish spirit grounds her and gives her courage and a connection to her Babamukuru:
“Babamukuru Jimson was never far away, but I no longer needed him to be there for me to stand up to my stepmother. As long as I could feel him through the pendant, I could hold onto my inner stillness.”
Shamiso becomes haunted. She has what Western medicine would interpret as a breakdown, but what in Shamiso’s own cosmology is a breakthrough to the spiritual world and her ancestors. In some of the novel’s best passages, Shamiso comes to herself to find she has walked 75 km towards the eastern part of Zimbabwe, where her ancestors dwell. She completes the trip by bus and treks up a sacred mountain when she gets there to commune with the spirits. She finds something there, coming away finally with a sense of self and with the determination not to lose her mind.
It’s important to note that this section introduced for me a severely discordant note, as the Nyami Nyami spirit belongs to the Tonga people of the west of Zimbabwe, whereas Shamiso is shown to be rooted in Chimanimani, in the east. The spirits of the various Zimbabwean cosmologies are geographical and belong to particular nations; I don’t believe, then, that Nyami Nyami could make a meaningful connection with Shamiso, or Shamiso with them. As Nyami Nyami becomes a central theme of the novel, it did rather puzzle me that Chikwava made this choice.
Nevertheless, it’s also in this part where the novel acquires a more surreal feel; from this point on, Shamiso is a somewhat less reliable narrator; the goings-on in her life acquire a layer of mystery, and the story becomes more meditative and filled with imagery from the art Babamukuru taught Shamiso to make.
When she’s eighteen, Shamiso is thrust into and welcomes the freedom it gives her to be away from her family and culture: She has won a scholarship to art school in the UK. This is also the section of the novel that, to me, recollects and reimagines *Harare North*. In the UK, Shamiso finds care and attention in the home of Nishta and Gabriel, who’ve taken her in. She meets George who is, in many ways, her soulmate. Shamiso learns boldness. Her world is much-expanded as a result of her transplantation to this new culture, and she embraces it all. Still haunted and revisited by the traumas of her childhood, she still finds a way to a kind of peace. And now, more than ever, her life is threaded through with and grounded in Nyami Nyami, the snake spirit.
If Shamiso as a sculptor learns to use the subtractive technique, it feels like Chikwava may have, too, in the writing of this novel, “[removed] material from a block until something … [emerged]… [not] imposing form but anticipating.’ We don’t come to the end of Shamiso’s journey; it’s hard to know where she’ll end up. But perhaps that doesn’t matter: We’ve seen her through to yet another beginning by the end of the novel. What she’ll make of it, we can only guess.
A book well worth reading, and recommended. Many thanks to Brian Chikwava for the review copy.
August 19, 2025
This short book is told from the perspective of Shamiso, a Zimbabwean young woman, who moves to London to study in search for better opportunities. The story jumps a bit in time, between fragments of her life growing up in Zimbabwe, and the cultural context of that life, and her present life in London, where she struggles with finding herself, particularly when a relationship with an unusual man diverts her attention and forces her to go through multiple ups and downs over many years.
I struggled with the book, overall. The main impression I got was that of something that almost, almost, was good, but just wasn't. Perhaps it's the patchy storytelling that made it difficult for me to really understand what was happening and how the various events were connected to each other. Perhaps it was the author glossing over the character building of her lead protagonists, making their decisions difficult to understand and accept, leaving me frustrated with the apparent randomness of it all. Perhaps it was also the lack of a hook that made me care about what was actually happening.
To be fair, the writing wasn't half bad, and the idea at the core of the book was fine too (albeit far from novel). I was able to finish the book, but perhaps it was because it was thankfully so short.
I can't really recommend. There are so many other books dealing with contemporary identity challenges encountered by young Africans, and this one just doesn't cut it.
My thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with an early copy of this book in return for an honest review.
I struggled with the book, overall. The main impression I got was that of something that almost, almost, was good, but just wasn't. Perhaps it's the patchy storytelling that made it difficult for me to really understand what was happening and how the various events were connected to each other. Perhaps it was the author glossing over the character building of her lead protagonists, making their decisions difficult to understand and accept, leaving me frustrated with the apparent randomness of it all. Perhaps it was also the lack of a hook that made me care about what was actually happening.
To be fair, the writing wasn't half bad, and the idea at the core of the book was fine too (albeit far from novel). I was able to finish the book, but perhaps it was because it was thankfully so short.
I can't really recommend. There are so many other books dealing with contemporary identity challenges encountered by young Africans, and this one just doesn't cut it.
My thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with an early copy of this book in return for an honest review.
August 26, 2025
This novella reads as a delicate ballad of love and loss from the perspective of the protagonist, Shamiso (short for Chishamiso) who teeters between the identities the world prescribes and proscribes. Gender, belonging, beauty and grief collide in this imaginative story that hops between Harare and Brighton to the Outer Hebrides to follow Shamiso as she comes of age. Chikwava writes kindly with gorgeous prose and stunning imagery that is worth multiple rereads. This is the first book I've read from Brian Chikwava and I can honestly say, I was quickly enchanted with his charmed style of writing. There is something so succinct yet thorough about Chikwava's choice of metaphor and simile. Shamiso's backstory is slightly drawn out in the beginning, which may make the story appear patchy initially, but this pace is rescued halfway through once Shamiso makes her move to the UK. Ultimately, the 'weighty' start to the story is crucial context for the end, which arrives quickly once readers find their rhythm. Every word employed in the book feels intended for a wider, relevant meaning, which is a trait often lost when it comes to writing about broad themes such as coloniality, gender and sexuality; from the use of gender-neutral pronouns to Shona terminology, on every page, Chikwava manages to enchant the reader with gentility, fragility and temerity. Safe to say I'm a fan of Chikwava and Shamiso's story. This made for a good summer read and reminded me of the importance of practising patience when I read.
November 6, 2025
Lyrical but dampened
—
Shamiso is a young girl newly moved to Harare, surrounded by supportive family who are each extraordinary in their own way: a father who was a rebel soldier and now an establishment figure, the elder of the family who is as much trickster as mentor. As a young woman, Shamiso’s skill at carving Shona gods gets her a scholarship to Brighton, and she finds a new family of extraordinary people: her landlords like new parents, one a Ugandan immigrant; their adopted child, who might be the one love that Shamiso has never had before. As she passes through these distinct yet related worlds, Shamiso also communes with the spirit world, the unseen but helping hands of gods and ancestors guiding her to her best self.
In a novel full of shifting, metamorphic characters and a Zimbabwean context that’s elevated by Chikwava’s lyrical prose, the structure of the protagonist’s story is what lets it down. Taking a more or less literal straight route from her childhood to her New Adult self, I found it difficult to get into Shamiso’s evolution and her motivations, especially as I know so little of Zimbabwean customs and language, whereas Shamiso (and the author) have all of their experience and language to lean on; and when the ending hinges on Shamiso realising that her mother tongue is part of the solution, but I have no idea what that means, all I felt was frustration. Some beautiful, succinct language, but the overall effect is dampened.
—
Shamiso is a young girl newly moved to Harare, surrounded by supportive family who are each extraordinary in their own way: a father who was a rebel soldier and now an establishment figure, the elder of the family who is as much trickster as mentor. As a young woman, Shamiso’s skill at carving Shona gods gets her a scholarship to Brighton, and she finds a new family of extraordinary people: her landlords like new parents, one a Ugandan immigrant; their adopted child, who might be the one love that Shamiso has never had before. As she passes through these distinct yet related worlds, Shamiso also communes with the spirit world, the unseen but helping hands of gods and ancestors guiding her to her best self.
In a novel full of shifting, metamorphic characters and a Zimbabwean context that’s elevated by Chikwava’s lyrical prose, the structure of the protagonist’s story is what lets it down. Taking a more or less literal straight route from her childhood to her New Adult self, I found it difficult to get into Shamiso’s evolution and her motivations, especially as I know so little of Zimbabwean customs and language, whereas Shamiso (and the author) have all of their experience and language to lean on; and when the ending hinges on Shamiso realising that her mother tongue is part of the solution, but I have no idea what that means, all I felt was frustration. Some beautiful, succinct language, but the overall effect is dampened.
September 6, 2025
The greatest strength of this coming-of-age story, about a Zimbabwean girl who comes to England to study, is Chikwava's punchy, sinewy prose, full of striking metaphors—"obese with grief", the "sleeping-elephant shape" of a mountain, the description of a cricket's noises as a "sonic drill [that] goes through my heart". This rich sense of voice enhances a story designed to be irresolute. The titular character struggles to find an identity or past, in one scene ruminating on how her classmates deliver their own biographies with poised ease; indeed, the book begins by introducing her relatives, patiently waiting for her to step in at a later moment. While this yields many beautifully written sequences, the result is a story that often feels narratively shapeless, albeit deliberately so.
August 26, 2025
What the hell? What the helly? What the Halle Berry? What the helly bron James?
The narrative structure confused me so much that I kept on getting lost. Not an enjoyable read at all.
The narrative structure confused me so much that I kept on getting lost. Not an enjoyable read at all.
November 24, 2025
Love. The time fragments paint a perfect picture of life and living.
November 16, 2025
This is about a woman called Shamiso. She's a young girl, thoughtful but uncertain, and she is living in rural Zimbabwe. She's then moved to the city and then she ends up moving to Brighton in England. This book is all about her discovering herself, discovering what her culture means to her when she is displaced and is in another culture and learning about her love, about her sexuality, about caring for herself.
This was a really well-written contemporary. I really didn't relate at all to Shamiso. And I always enjoy that because as a British, white, nerdy, brunette, woman in fiction, you get to relate to most characters. They're written to be like you. And so instead having Shamiso being a Zimbabwean Black woman who has relocated to the UK, their gender identity is much more fluid. Their sexuality is much more fluid and it's completely alien to my own personal experience and I adore that. This is why we read. I got to experience something so outside of my own life and for that I adored this book.
This was a really well-written contemporary. I really didn't relate at all to Shamiso. And I always enjoy that because as a British, white, nerdy, brunette, woman in fiction, you get to relate to most characters. They're written to be like you. And so instead having Shamiso being a Zimbabwean Black woman who has relocated to the UK, their gender identity is much more fluid. Their sexuality is much more fluid and it's completely alien to my own personal experience and I adore that. This is why we read. I got to experience something so outside of my own life and for that I adored this book.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews