Publisher: Weaver Press, Zimbabwe
Pages: 76
Year: 2005
Category: Contemporary Fiction, Literature, Urban Life
Dimensions: 216 x 140 mm
Sketches of High Density Life by Wonder Guchu was named Best First Book by the 2005 Zimbabwe Publishers’ Association Literary Awards.
Harare has been pulling people into its environs for well over a century. The city’s townships are inhabited by strangers and old acquaintances, hardened old-timers and naive newcomers, who embrace a mixture of languages, traditions and confusions. Wonder Guchu sketches some of these land- and cityscapes, where rumour, reality and urban myth converge. Who was killed to the strains of ‘the lion sleeps tonight…’? Where do the ghosts under the bridges live? Who was murdered beside the house with a blue door?
£13.00
About the author
Wonder Guchu is currently a journalist with The Herald newspaper in Harare. He was born in 1969 near Mvurwi and trained as a teacher of English at Gweru Teachers’ College between 1988 and 1990. He subsequently spent five years teaching Masvingo and six in Harare. By this time he had been writing stories and poems for nine years, some of which were published in The Sunday Mail magazine, Tsotso and Moto. He also reviewed books for The Masvingo Star, The Independent, Parade, The Herald, The Sunday Standard and The Daily News, and was the music critic for the now defunct Masvingo Tribune. His writing features also in Writing Still. New Stories from Zimbabwe (Weaver Press, 2003). He is married with two children.
Review
‘The anthology captures the whole range and texture of the ghetto experience as Guchu delineates the life of ordinary people seeking to humanise their space and make ends meet despite all the odds staked against them’.
The Sunday Mirror, Zimbabwe
“[This is] a subject that continues to fascinate our historical imagination and has great relevance to world and African history… among the distinct insights are the qualitative differences between Ghanaian domestic slavery and New World slavery and other slave systems, placing the study in a very significant comparative mode. The author succeeds in producing a text that is very good reading for undergraduates and all interested persons.”
Multicultural Review