House of Stone by Novuyo Rosa Tshuma
Winner of the Edward Stanford Prize for Fiction with a Sense of Place, 2019
Shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize, 2019
Shortlisted for the Orwell Prize, 2019
Longlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize, 2019
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'Easily the best debut I've read this year, Tshuma's novel is both hilarious and horrifying, filled with compassion, anger and despair. [Her] unreliable narrator [is] of the kind that deserves to be remembered up there with Humbert Humbert' Kim Evans, Culturefly
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Bukhosi has gone missing.
His father, Abed, and his mother, Agnes, cling to the hope that he has run away, rather than been murdered by government thugs. Only the lodger seems to have any idea...
Zamani has lived in the spare room for years now. Quiet, polite, well-read and well-heeled, he's almost part of the family - but almost isn't quite good enough for Zamani. Cajoling, coaxing and coercing Abed and Agnes into revealing their sometimes tender, often brutal life stories, Zamani aims to steep himself in borrowed family history, so that he can fully inherit and inhabit its uncertain future.