House of Stone

Winner of the Edward Stanford Prize for Fiction with a Sense of Place; 2019Longlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize; 2019Longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize; 2019_'Easily the best debut I've read this year; Tshuma's novel is both hilarious and horrifying; filled with compassion; anger and despair. [Her] unreliable narrator [is] of the kind that deserves to be remembered up there with Humbert Humbert' Kim Evans; Culturefly_Bukhosi has gone missing. His father; Abed; and his mother; Agnes; cling to the hope that he has run away; rather than been murdered by government thugs. Only the lodger seems to have any idea... Zamani has lived in the spare room for years now. Quiet; polite; well-read and well-heeled; he's almost part of the family - but almost isn't quite good enough for Zamani. Cajoling; coaxing and coercing Abed and Agnes into revealing their sometimes tender; often brutal life stories; Zamani aims to steep himself in borrowed family history; so that he can fully inherit and inhabit its uncertain future.