The House of Hunger - Softcover

Marechera, Dambudzo

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1478604735 ISBN 13: 9781478604730

Publisher: Waveland Pr Inc, 2013

Synopsis

Winner of the Guardian fiction prize, this novella and nine short stories describe life in a Zimbabwean township. They are about the brutalization of the individual's mental processes, until madness, violence and despair become the normal state of affairs for families in black urban areas.

About this title

Review:

"Marechera has in him the stuff and substance that go to make a great writer."-Doris Lessing

About the Author:

Dambudzo Marechera, the son of a lorry driver, was born in 1955 in Vengere township, Rusape Rhodesia. Marechera went to a mission boarding school, supported by scholarships. He subsequently went on to the University of Rhodesia, from which he was expelled in 1973 following a protest demonstration. A scholarship took him to the University of Oxford in 1974.
During the next eight years Marechera remained in exile in England but with no fixed abode or employment. He had brushes with the police which led to detentions and imprisonment. His return to Zimbabwe in 1982 was traumatic: independent Zimbabwe was no more accommodating to him than Ian Smith's Rhodesia. He died tragically young in 1987, a victim of the AIDS virus.
His collection of short stories, The House of Hunger, was published in 1978 to considerable critical acclaim. It won the prestigious Guardian Fiction Prize in 1979. This was followed in 1980 by his novel Black Sunlight (also published by Heinemann) and Mindblast in 1984 (The College Press, Harare). The Black Insider, which was written in 1978, has been published posthumously by Baobab Books in Zimbabwe.

About this edition

• Publisher: Waveland Pr Inc
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1478604735
• ISBN 13: 9781478604730
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 159