Harare Voices and Beyond (PB) (2023)

"Harare Voices and Beyond takes us on a journey through the dark recesses of the human psyche."

─Sue Quainton, Bicester, United Kingdom

A drunken confession exposes a dark family secret. Rhys appears to have it all. A white Zimbabwean living in affluent Borrowdale Brooke area he gets involved in a freak traffic accident. Therein unfolds a confession which unleashes a cathartic chain of events in the family's hitherto well-choreographed life, a family whose lived experience becomes microcosmic and an eye opener to Zimbabwe's seemingly closed, forgotten, white minority community.

Through offering a rare insight into lives of the white community in post-independence Zimbabwe, Harare Voices and Beyond explores the dynamics of love, money, family feuds, identity politics, false philanthropy, and respectability inter-alia. Two families' lives are inexorably linked in this fast-paced narrative which not only traverses multiple locations, but also juxtaposes the seedy underbelly of Harare with the leafy northern suburbs, and little-known Marina Thompson from UK Durham University all appear linked in a drama-infused finale that will shock and numb the reader.

Endorsement:

Daring. Harare Voices and Beyond is full of intrigue and brutality. An unflinching portrait of broken families and a broken society.

─Paida Chiwara

In this his third novel, fire brand Zimbabwean novelist, Andrew Chatora, demonstrates that every man understands the complexity of his crime and the subsequently unsuitable punishment. This is a rare story about loss and strife in post independent Zimbabwe.

This is a detective story with no detectives. It is more like Doris Lessing's The Grass is Singing and Ngugi wa Thiongo's A Grain of Wheat in that the guilty is always in your midst, helping you solve the crime but making sure the criminal is not easily found. In the end you appreciate both the crime and the cause of the crime. You see that the criminal is an ordinary man who is driven over the precipice by irreparable generational loss. This is a deft work of art.

─Memory Chirere, University of Zimbabwe

Chatora expertly deals with unresolved trauma, psychosis, identity politics, citizenship, and nationhood issues through the portrait of both white and black Zimbabweans' lived culture.

─Malvern Mukudu, Writer & Journalist, Rhodes University, South Africa

About the Author:

Andrew Chatora is a Zimbabwean novelist, essayist and short-story writer based in Bicester, England. He grew up in Mutare, Zimbabwe, and moved to England in 2002. His debut novella, Diaspora Dreams (2021), was approvingly received and nominated for the National Arts Merit Awards (2022). His second book, Where the Heart Is, was published in the same year to considerable acclaim. Chatora's forthcoming book, Born Here, But Not in My Name, is a brave, humorous and psychologically penetrating portrait of post-Brexit Britain. Chatora is noted for his acerbic and honest depiction of the migrant experience. Heavily influenced by his own experience as a black English teacher in the United Kingdom, Chatora probes multi-cultural relationships, identity politics, blackness, migration, citizenship and nationhood.