Top ten books about Zimbabwe

Petina Gappah is a Zimbabwean writer with law degrees from Cambridge, Graz University and the University of Zimbabwe. Her books include the story collection An Elegy for Easterly and the novel The Book of Memory. One of her top ten books about Zimbabwe, as shared at the Guardian:

Butterfly Burning by Yvonne Vera (1998)

Set in the Bulawayo township of Makokoba in the 1940s, this is the story of the doomed May-December love affair between Fumbatha, a construction worker, and the much younger Phephelaphi who dreams of being a nurse. A brutal event separates the couple. Vera’s prose can be elliptical – the horrors that befall the couple are described with such lyrical beauty that they are not always fully felt by the reader – but no other writer has so powerfully captured the many faces of Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second-largest, and loveliest, city.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue