Bryony's Blog

In a hot, airless little room in Bulawayo, an elderly man rummages through disintegrating brown envelopes and rusty files.   Faint labels carry captions such as: ‘Railway Staff 1932-33’ and ‘Wages March 1952’.   There are dusty black and white photographs on the wall of men in dark suits and hats.   Unsmiling, they all look alarmingly similar with their handle-bar moustaches and their arms crossed resolutely across their chests.                 ‘No.   I thought I might have something, but no.’ He reluctantly admits defeat, so convinced was he that he might be able to help me in my search. I am in the archives of the Railway Museum in Bulawayo.   The buildings themselves are run down and we are surrounded by the great hulks of rusting train carcasses. The museum, now a separate entity from the National Railways of Zimbabwe, is run by a couple of train enthusiasts, who are extremely kn...

I think one of the hardest things about writing a novel is convincing others you are up to the job.   For some reason, saying you want to be a writer is akin to saying you want to be an astronaut or a brain surgeon.   You get that look – you know the one adults use with children?   Oh, that’s nice! And really you know they’re inwardly shaking their heads or, worse, they’ve already dismissed the thought so that, the next time you mention it, you either get a blank stare or that look my mother used to give me when I insisted on doing something she didn’t like – Well, we’ll speak to your father about it, but I doubt he’ll like it either.                 Zimbabwe had descended into complete economic and political chaos while I was in the throes of writing This September Sun and suddenly everyone was writing their memoirs: the war years, the years on the farm, their years in Africa.   I rem...

Agatha and I go back a long way.  As a child, my grandmother was an avid reader of her novels and when I went to the library to change my gran's books for her, I was often asked to pick up an Agatha Christie or two.  So it was that I became familiar with many of her titles and the covers of the Fontana paperback editions of her books (there were the odd Crime Club editions as well).  We also went to watch film versions of Murder on the Orient Express, Evil Under the Sun and Endless Night.  I was absolutely scared stiff and remember having difficulty going to sleep afterwards!  We would watch television adaptations of Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot as a family.  No one answered the phone and any visitors at the door were viewed with impatient disdain.  During the adverts, someone would rush out and make a cup of tea and then rush back, often asking frantically 'What did I miss?  Did I miss anything?' The first Christie I read ...

It's World Book Day today. We bring you Barbara Mhangami-Ruwende's review of Zimbabwean novel This September Sun.   This September Sun is a searing account of family and “the ties that bind” as told from the perspective of a young woman trying to find her place within her family, her country and her world at large. The story is set in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe and begins in dramatic fashion: “On the 18th of April 1980, my grandfather burnt the British flag. I remember because it was my sixth birthday and he ruined it.” From this point on, Rheam reels the reader in to a heady tale of love, hate, deceit and betrayal, laughter and tears, anger and joy, destruction and renewal. Born into a family full of secrets, young Ellie quickly becomes aware of the coldness and the heavy, unarticulated emotions between her grandmother Evelyn and her grandfather Leonard. She is also aware of the tension between her mother Francie and her grandmother and is o...

This blog was originally published on the Caine Prize blog in April 2014 The Bvumba is a special place for me: as a child, my family spent many holidays there and I have lots of special memories of long walks through the jungly terrain, sitting next to a huge open fire in the evenings and watching the mist rise as the sun came up in the morning.   In 1981, we lived for a year in Penhalonga, not far from Mutare along the Mozambican border.   I remember going to school in a very old bus, chugging up Christmas Pass and then that wonderful sense of almost freewheeling it down the other side into Mutare where I went to school.   It was a time of great transition in Zimbabwe: black children were allowed into what had predominantly been white government schools, and many white people were leaving for places such as South Africa and Australia.   The war in Mozambique was still in full force and, for all that we were so near, we may as well have been on a different plane...