This Mournable Body cover art

This Mournable Body

A Novel

Preview
Try for $0.00
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Unlimited access to our all-you-can-listen catalogue of 15K+ audiobooks and podcasts
Premium Plus auto-renews for $14.95/mo + applicable taxes after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

This Mournable Body

Written by: Tsitsi Dangarembga
Narrated by: Adenrele Ojo
Try for $0.00

$14.95 a month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for $23.31

Buy Now for $23.31

About this listen

Anxious about her prospects after leaving a stagnant job, Tambudzai finds herself living in a run-down youth hostel in downtown Harare. For reasons that include her grim financial prospects and her age, she moves to a widow's boarding house and eventually finds work as a biology teacher. But at every turn in her attempt to make a life for herself, she is faced with a fresh humiliation, until the painful contrast between the future she imagined and her daily reality ultimately drives her to a breaking point.

In This Mournable Body, Tsitsi Dangarembga returns to the protagonist of her acclaimed first novel, Nervous Conditions, to examine how the hope and potential of a young girl and a fledgling nation can sour over time and become a bitter and floundering struggle for survival.

As a last resort, Tambudzai takes an ecotourism job that forces her to return to her parents' impoverished homestead. It is this homecoming, in Dangarembga's tense and psychologically charged novel, that culminates in an act of betrayal, revealing just how toxic the combination of colonialism and capitalism can be.

©2018 Tsitsi Dangarembga (P)2018 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books
Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Fiction Africa
No reviews yet