Novuyo Rosa Tshuma

"A towering and multilayered gem." --NoViolet Bulawayo

House of Stone

A Novel

Digging Stars

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 astronomer father’s revolutionary work in Bantu geometries and Indigenous astronomies. A bona fide genius, he transformed the scientific landscape by fusing the best of Western and Indigenous scientific thought. Yet since his death during her childhood, Rosa has been plagued by anxiety attacks she dubs “The Terrors”—and by unresolved questions about her father’s life. Who is his mysterious friend Mr. C? Who was her father, really? Ambitious, hungry for success, and determined to soar, 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 Péralte, Rosa’s estranged stepbrother whose obsessive videogaming 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. Digging Stars is a paean to the cosmos and a celebration of the democratic spirit of knowledge. Novuyo Rosa 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.

Digging Stars: A Novel

Pulsing with wit, seduction, and dark humor, House of Stone is a masterful debut that explores the creative—and often destructive—act of history-making. In the chronic turmoil of modern Zimbabwe, Abednego and Agnes Mlambo’s teenage son, Bukhosi, has gone missing, and the Mlambos fear the worst. Their enigmatic lodger, Zamani, seems to be their last, best hope for finding him. Since Bukhosi’s disappearance, Zamani has been preternaturally helpful: hanging missing posters in downtown Bulawayo, handing out fliers to passersby, and joining in family prayer vigils with the flamboyant Reverend Pastor from Agnes’s Blessed Anointings church. It’s almost like Zamani is part of the family… But almost isn’t nearly enough for Zamani. He ingratiates himself with Agnes and feeds alcoholic Abednego’s addiction, desperate to extract their life stories and steep himself in borrowed family history, as keenly aware as any colonialist or power-mad despot that the one who controls the narrative inherits the future. As Abednego wrestles with the ghosts of his past and Agnes seeks solace in a deep-rooted love, their histories converge and each must confront the past to find their place in a new Zimbabwe. Pulsing with wit, seduction, and dark humor, House of Stone is a sweeping epic that spans the fall of Rhodesia through Zimbabwe’s turbulent beginnings, exploring the persistence of the oppressed in a young nation seeking an identity, but built on forgetting.

House of Stone: A Novel

A gripping novella by one of Southern Africa's rising stars of literature, "Shadows" is set in the ghettos of Bulawayo and Johannesburg.

Shadows

There are only five other black girls in our class of twenty-six... ________________________ From the author of the critically-acclaimed House of Stone, listed for the Folio Prize, is a short story about growing up in Zimbabwe ________________________ A country school girl attends the prestigious Girls' College in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe and she learns how to be English. She learns pronunciations, learns to pour, sip, and hold tea, and even learns to laugh the English way- Hahaha!...Hahaha... Haaaaa haaaaa haaaa... But things begin to change for the pupils of Girls' College when Zimbabwe's new president calls for 'A' grade schools to enrol more black pupils.

Novuyo Rosa Tshuma

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