The Unlikely Genius Of Dr Cuthbert Kambazuma

Teddington is a man on the make and, after inadvertently delivering a busload of opposition politicians to Harare's chief psychiatric facility, he is rewarded with a farm by top war veteran Hitler Jesus. Not far away at The William Westward Children's Home, the director and his ginger-haired sidekick struggle to feed and clothe the multitude of orphans until they chance upon, of all things, a moth exporting business. When Teddington's farm can no longer support his spiralling ambitions, he turns his attentions to the well-run and now prosperous orphanage. Enter bogus goblin-catcher and con-man extraordinaire Cuthbert Kambazuma. Does he have the power to keep Teddington and the Green Bombers at bay, or will the orphanage fall into their rapacious hands? Chris Wadman has written a novel of startling originality. In the best tradition of political satire, he combines humour and tragedy, and introduces a cast of characters that run riot across the near lunacy of the Zimbabwean landscape.

Teddington is a man on the make and, after inadvertently delivering a busload of opposition politicians to Harares chief psychiatric facility, he is rewarded with a farm by top war veteran Hitler Jesus. Not far away at The William Westward Childrens Home, the director and his ginger-haired sidekick struggle to feed and clothe the multitude of orphans until they chance upon, of all things, a moth exporting business. When Teddingtons farm can no longer support his spiralling ambitions, he turns his attentions to the well-run and now prosperous orphanage. Enter bogus goblin-catcher and con-man extraordinaire Cuthbert Kambazuma. Does he have the power to keep Teddington and the Green Bombers at bay, or will the orphanage fall into their rapacious hands? Chris Wadman has written a novel of startling originality. In the best tradition of political satire, he combines humour and tragedy, and introduces a cast of characters that run riot across the near lunacy of the Zimbabwean landscape.

In a London gay bar, a charismatic stranger accosts an editor still raw from his lover's abandonment. The stranger insists he is the modern avatar of Pandarus, intent on getting his version of events published to country the unflattering portrait of him that Shakespeare has given to the world. And so begins Michiel Heyns's eighth novel, a modern retelling of the story of Troilus and Criseyde, set during the tenth year of the Trojan War, with both sides of the conflict exhausted and the supreme warrior Achilles sulking in his tent. This urbane and sparking rendition of the classical tale is interspersed with meetings between the editor and Pandarus, as the latter supplies instalments of his tale. I am Pandarus combines shrewd domestic comedy with high heroic tragedy in an original exploration of the nature of love, friendship, warfare and loss.

Some of my best friends are white is a collection of sharp, satirical essays on contemporary South African issues from the point of view of a successful corporate professional - who just happens to be Zulu. Crossing various controversial, amusing and downright confusing racial divides, the title delivers a healthy dose of black - and white - humour as it explores some of the rainbow nation's defining characteristics, its many colourful characters and its myriad mysterious idiosyncrasies.

Nadine Gordimer is one of our most telling contemporary writers. With each new work, she attacks - with a clear-eyed lack of sentimentality, and an understanding of the darkest depths of the human soul - the inextricable link between personal life and political, communal history. The revelation of this theme in each new work, not only in her homeland South Africa, but the twenty-first century world, is evidence of her literary genius: in the sharpness of her psychological insights, the stark beauty of her language, the complexity of her characters and the difficult choices with which they are faced.In No Time Like the Present, Gordimer brings the reader into the lives of Steven Reed and Jabulile Gumede, a 'mixed' couple, both of whom have been combatants in the struggle for freedom against apartheid. Once clandestine lovers under racist law forbidding sexual relations between white and black, they are now in the new South Africa. The place and time where freedom - the 'better life for all' that was fought for and promised - is being created but also challenged by political and racial tensions, while the hangover of moral ambiguities and the vast and growing gap between affluence and mass poverty, continue to haunt the present. No freedom from personal involvement in these or in the personal intimacy of love.The subject is contemporary, but Gordimer's treatment is timeless. In No Time Like the Present, she shows herself once again a master novelist, at the height of her prodigious powers.

This monograph explores the concept of mobility in Zimbabwean works of fiction published in English between the introduction of the controversial Fast Track Land Reform Programme and the end of the Mugabe era. Since 2000, Zimbabwe has experienced unprecedented levels of transnational out-migration in response to the political conflicts and economic downturn often referred to as the Zimbabwe Crisis. This, in turn, has led to an increased outpouring of literary texts about migration, both in locally produced texts and in works by authors based in the diaspora. Situating Zimbabwe’s recent literary developments in a wider context of Southern African writing and history, this book focuses on texts that portray movement within Zimbabwe’s cities, between village and city, to South Africa, and overseas. The author examines important developments and trends in recent Zimbabwean literature, investigating the link between state authoritarianism and control of mobility, and literature’s potential to intervene into dominant political discourses. The book includes in-depth analyses of ten recent works of fiction published in the post-2000 era and develops mobility as a key category of literary analysis of Zimbabwe’s contemporary literatures. Setting out a rich dialogue between literary criticism and mobility studies, this book will be of interest to researchers of African literature, Southern Africa, migration, and mobility.

Eleven year old Ajuba has been abandoned at a Devon boarding school by her Ghanaian father. Haunted by the circumstances of her mother's breakdown, Ajuba falls under the spell of new girl Polly Venus, and her chaotic, glamorous family. As the passionate bond between the two girls deepens, they discover what they think are the bones of dead kittens, hidden in the attic of the Venus home; but the bones are human. The girls set out to unravel the mystery but as the summer draws to a close, three tragedies conflate, with catastrophic results.