THIS MOURNABLE BODY, a novel

272pp., paperback, First SA Edition, Johannesburg, 2018.

First published in USA in 2018.

Shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize.

The novel concludes the trilogy that began with Nervous Conditions and continued in The Book of Not.

Every attempt Tambudzai makes to create a life for herself confronts her with fresh humiliation until, as a last resort, she takes an ecotourism job that forces her to return to the impoverished homestead she had hoped to escape.

"A haunting evocation of the nature of small defeats. Only a writer steeped in Zimbabwean life - with her unflinching gaze on the individual, and with a social vision that brooks no sentimentality - could have given us the fraught heroine of this starkly written novel. Tsitsi Dangerembga proves yet again that hers is a maverick voice." A. Igoni Barrett, author of Blackass and Love is Power, or Something Like That

"Tsitsi Dangarembga's work, begun thirty years ago with her masterpiece, Nervous Conditions, reaches a provocative and brilliant new height with this extraordinary novel. This Mournable Body demands answers from all who have suffered and survived the violence of the twenty-first century only to find history and injustice, cruelty and rebellion, woven into their souls. If all the doors are barred, can we still find our way free?" Madeleine Thien, author of Do Not Say We Have Nothing

“[A] masterpiece. . . . Dangarembga writes with intimacy and compassion; there’s a sharp poetic crack to the work that keeps the story from muddying in melancholy, as it might in the hands of a less cinematic writer.” New York Times Book Review

Tsitsi Dangarembga is also a filmmaker, playwright and the director of the Institute of Creative Arts for Progress in Africa Trust. She lives in Harare, Zimbabwe.