Tendai Huchu reviews This September Sun ‘On the 18 th of April 1980, my grandfather burnt the British flag.’ So begins Bryony Rheam’s genre blending debut novel. Ellie, the main protagonist, is a young girl searching for identity in the self-absorbed, often neurotic postcolonial settler community in Zimbabwe. Her relationship with Evelyn, her grandmother whose cupboard has more skeletons than most, provides a back drop to a narrative that sweeps right from the Second World War through to the early 2000’s. Evelyn leaves her husband, Ellie’s grandfather, and strikes out on her own late in life, forming a new partnership with Miles, a man with his own difficult past, trying to eke a living on a small dust bowl outside of Bulawayo. Through Ellie’s observations we learn of the lives of the small closeted, white Zimbabwean society, dirty laundry is aired, nothing is spared, the illicit affairs, alcoholism, racism, misogyny, hopes, dreams and fears that linger long after...
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