HOUSE OF STONE

Spanning fifty tumultuous years in southern Africa, House of Stone is a deeply smart, wildly inventive and often darkly humorous novel about cuckoos in the family nest and the murderous need to belong.

"I am a man on a mission. A vocation, call it, to remake the past, a wish to fashion all that has been into being and becoming." So says Zamani, the enigmatic and erudite lodger in Abednego and Agnes Mlambo's home in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. Bukhosi, the Mlambo's teenage son, has gone missing, and his parents fear the worstand most likelypossibility: that he has been disappeared by the state police. Zamani, preternaturally helpful and almost a part of the family, seems to be the Mlambos' last, best hope of finding their son. But almost isn't quite enough for Zamani. As he cajoles, coaxes and coerces his hosts into revealing their sometimes tender, sometimes brutal life stories, Zamani steeps himself in borrowed family history, keenly aware that the one who controls the narrative will inherit the future. Bursting with wit, rage and seduction, the prodigiously talented Novuyo Rosa Tshuma prosecutes the past and celebrates those on the wrong side of history in this mad and glorious epic about the death of colonial Rhodesia and the bloody birth of modern Zimbabwe. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Novuyo Tshuma is a native of Zimbabwe, has lived in South Africa and the USA. SHADOWS, her short story collection, was published to critical acclaim by Kwela in South Africa, and awarded the 2014 Herman Charles Bosman Prize. Novuyo has received writing residencies from the Rockefeller Foundation's prestigious Bellagio Programme, and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. She has work forthcoming in McSweeney's and The Displaced, an anthology edited by the Pulitzer Prize winning writer Viet Thanh Nguyen. Novuyo serves on the Editorial Advisory Board and is a Fiction Editor at The Bare Life Review, a journal of refugee and immigrant literature based New York.