Valerie Tagwira

A quiet and ambitious novel, this is a story that works in the tradition of Dickens to not only tell an engaging story of social relevance, but to illustrate a wide range of individuals. Tagwira's work here is not only one of the rare novels to directly engage with the intertwined questions of HIV/AIDS and poverty, and unflinchingly, but does so from the perspective of victims who are not directly infected with the virus--something I haven't seen before in African literature. If you're show more interested, this novel is worth finding. And, if you want a contemporary example of Dickens... show less