Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Maren Wiederhold
Categories
Biography, Literature & Literary studies

DIGGING STARS

Novuyo Tshuma

A novel

Blending drama and satire while examining the complexities of colonialism, racism, and what it means to be American, Digging Stars probes the emotional universes of love, friendship, family, and nationhood.

With admission to The Program, an elite interdisciplinary graduate cohort at the forefront of astronomy and technology, Rosa's dreams are finally within reach. Her research into the cosmos follows in the footsteps of her father's revolutionary work in Bantu Geometry and indigenous astronomies. He transformed the scientific landscape by reframing Western interpretations of the stars around native African traditions. He was a bona fide genius - that is, until his tragic death on a Zimbabwean highway. Was it really an accident? Or did his inscrutable colleague Mr. C have something to do with it? Plagued by anxiety attacks she dubs "The Terrors" and adrift in a cut-throat, technocapitalist academic bubble, Rosa joins the ranks of America's smartest. Her cohort of talented Fellows includes Shaniqua, her roommate, who is analyzing melanin molecules and their capacity to conduct electricity; Richard, an expert in quantum mechanics; Mausi, studying indigenous American scientific thought; and Peralte, Rosa's estranged stepbrother whose obsessive video-gaming has inspired him to become a programmer. Her classmates challenge Rosa's understanding of identity, personhood, the ethics of technology, and most painfully, her adulation of her father, whose legacy is more complicated than it appears. Blending drama and satire while examining the complexities of colonialism, racism, and what it means to be American, DIGGING STARS probes the emotional universes of love, friendship, family, and nationhood. Tshuma's characters explode the rigid matrices of the academy to prove that science, art, technology, and history are all planets orbiting the same sun. Novuyo Rosa Tshuma is the author of the novel House of Stone and a professor of fiction at Emerson College. A native of Zimbabwe, she has lived in South Africa and the US and has taught fiction workshops globally.

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Book Published 2023-09-12 by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. - New York (USA)

Comments

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

Novuyo Rosa Tshuma's virtuosic, word-drunk sentences cast bridges across the abysses of history and the gaps between the stars. In her second novel, 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.

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

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

Tshuma is nuanced yet explosive as she explores the intersection of science, identity and grief. The novel brims with insights about astronomy, technology and Indigenous folklore, and it thoughtfully questions how those ideas interact with race and heritage. Additionally, every description of space, science and math is rendered in moving prose that is both figuratively and emotionally charged... A smart incisive novel that blends a gripping coming-of-age story with a poignant story about loss. Read more...

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

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