AVENUES BY TRAIN

A dizzying, immersive debut from one of Zimbabwe's most exciting new writers

A dizzying, immersive debut from one of Zimbabwe's most exciting new writers AVENUES BY TRAIN opens in 1974, with the news that yet another girl has been abducted by a water spirit in the small town of Miner's Drift. In the same incident another young girl, Natsai, is touched by the water spirit but manages to escape. The protagonist of the book, Jedza, is Natsai's younger brother, aged seven when we first encounter him in 1984. When Jedza later has a similar escape in a tragic incident involving a train and the death of his close boyhood friend, he is convinced that his life is haunted. He comes to believe that his life is stuck in a loop of hardship in Miner's Drift. Jedza leaves for Harare in the hope that he will escape the darkness and superstitions of the small town. He instead discovers that the city has even deeper spiritual roots than Miner's Drift and the mysticism he encounters in the city leads him to come to terms with the spiritual forces in his bloodline and to eventually confront and resolve his traumatic past. Inspired by the author's experience as a practising Catholic in his youth, the novel explores the conflict between Shona spiritualism and Christianity in urban contemporary Zimbabwe. With wry humour evident from its early chapters, this is a bildungsroman of sorts, where nostalgic childhood reminiscences are juxtaposed with scenes depicting the social and economic degeneration of the country, inspired by the author's experience living in The Avenues, a red-light district of Harare. This eclectic, playful and experimental novel showcases a fresh new voice in contemporary African writing, recalling the fast-paced, riotous satire of Alain Mabanckou and Fiston Mwanza Mujila. Whilst paying homage to his literary heritage in this consciously intertextual novel, Mudzingwa pushes the boundaries of both content and form, with strands of magical realism running alongside hyper-realist immersion, shifts in perspective and time, and a multiplicity of different narrative voices and styles.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
His short fiction has been published by Weaver Press, Kwani? and Enkare Review II and his longform articles and reporting have been featured in Chimurenga Chronic, The Mail & Guardian, The Johannesburg Review of Books, Africa Is A Country, This Is Africa, The Africa Report and New Humanitarian. Farai was shortlisted for the Miles Morland Writing Scholarship (2019), the Short Story Day Africa competition (2019) and the Yvonne Vera competition (2013). He was longlisted for the Writivism competition in 2016. He lives in Harare.