List of books written by Petina Gappah
1). Rotten Row
2). An Elegy for Easterly
3). The
Book of Memory
Contents
Petina
Gappah: Brief Profile
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| Petina Gappah Picture |
Petina
Gappah is a Zimbabwean Fiction Writer and International Trade Lawyer. She
studied law at the Universities of Zimbabwe, Craz in Austria and Cambridge. She
is based in Geneva, Switzerland. Her stories are mainly set in Zimbabwe-her
home country, and are largely poignant, humane and funny collection of stories.
Her work has appeared work has appeared in Prospect, A Public Space , Per
Contra, and The Zimbabwe Times , on the website of Granta, and the New Yorker.
Rotten Row published by Faber & Faber
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| Book: Rotten Row |
The book
derives its name from the street 'Rotten Row' a hub of criminal courts in
Harare. In 'Rotten Row', corruption is rampant; bribes help criminals evade the
justice system. There is a strong sense of mob mentality ‘part of the justice
system’ and a strong reflection of the country's Mugabe regimes’ dwindling
infrastructure - so potholes at times happen to serve justice.
Characters in Rotten Row
Policemen
Divorcing
spouses
Old Familiar
Faces meeting for a workshop
An
executioner
A ghost that
is longing for justice
Two other stories are drawn from the actual
forms of documents seen daily on Rotten Row, a postmortem report and a judicial
opinion. A judge-female, in the opinion sets out the story of a failed marriage
in her legal decision granting a divorce, including her explanation that since
2004 it is illegal in Zimbabwe for a man to rape his wife.
An Elegy for
Easterly published by Faber & Faber
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| An Elegy for Easterly Summary |
About the book or
summary
An Elegy
for Easterly Petina Gappah’s second short story
collection, it is made up of thirteen ‘short’ stories, it
tells of the lives of people, rich and poor, who are caught up in events over
which they have little control. The stories are told in a delicate and simple
manner, and a number of the short stories explore very harsh political
realities in Zimbabwe during the late periods of Mugabe’s regime.
Township
woman longs for a baby of her own; a politician’s widow stands quietly by at her husband’s funeral, watching his colleagues
bury an empty casket; an old man finds that his new job making coffins at No
Matter Funeral Parlor brings unexpected riches.
Characters
have ordinary hopes and dreams, but what hinders them from reaching their goals
are the socio-economic circumstances- for instance, due to heavy inflation that
hit Zimbabwe in 2008 bread costs a million dollars, AIDS is rampant, and the
state controlled media is highly propagandist- that people only depend on
daily newspaper for a more 'truthful' side events
Thoughts on the anthology
"Death
and disaster, while never glossed over, are handled with unexpected humor, as
they often are in folktales, and this is a part of the book’s great charm." - The Guardian
(UK).
Read An Elegy for Easterly here
The
Book of Memory
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| Book: The Book of Memory |
The Book of
Memory is narrated by a woman who is in custody at Chikurubhi Maximum Security
Prison which is located in Harare, Zimbabwe. The woman, living with albinism,
is in the prison on charge of murdering his adopted father Lloyd Hendricks.
Memory retells the story for the sake of an appeal through her lawyer. The Book of Memory is also
largely about "jealousy and obsession and the triumph of evil over
good".
Major
questions that arise might be;
Why does
Memory feel no remorse for his death?
But who was
Lloyd Hendricks?
And did
everything happen exactly as she remembers?
Thoughts on the book
"This is a powerful story of innocent lives destroyed
by family secrets and sexual jealousy, prejudice and unacknowledged kinship
across the 'artificial divisions this country has erected to keep people
apart.'" - The Guardian (UK)
Petina Gappah awards
1). Guardian award for the work An Elergy for Easterly
About the Guardian award; The Guardian First Book Award was
created in 1999 and is open to all first-time authors writing in English,
across all genres.
Judges of the Guardian fiction prize 201 were BBC broadcaster
Martha Kearney, poet and novelist Tobias Hill, author Nadeem Aslam, political
philosopher John Gray, Broom and Guardian deputy editor Katharine Viner.
Prize money £10,000
Other Entries in
the shortlist;
Michael Peel's A Swamp Full of Dollars
The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton;
The Wilderness by Samantha Harvey;
Selected Works of TS Spivet by Reif Larsen
Author’s (Petina
Gappah) comments on receiving the award;
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Petina
Gappah on winning the Guardian Fiction Prize
2). In 2007, she came second in a SADC-wide short story contest judged by J.M.
Coetzee.
You can read some of Pettina Gappah's literary works here.
Sources
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