Bryony's Blog

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 of

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 planet.   The only inter