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English
Penguin Classics
15 May 2022
'When all else fails, don't take it in silence- scream like hell, scream like Jericho was tumbling down, serenaded by a brace of trombones, scream'

Dambudzo Marechera burst onto the English literary scene with a bang in 1978 with this vivid roar of a book exploring township life in pre-independence Zimbabwe.

Irreverent and uncompromising, Dambudzo Marechera rejected what he saw as the narrow stereotypes of African literature, and was a fearless critic of his country. The narrator expresses his desperate alienation - from his family, from his student friends, from township life and from Zimbabwe itself. This novella, and the other short stories here, portray an explosive world that flashes with both violence and humour.
By:  
Introduction by:   ,
Imprint:   Penguin Classics
Country of Publication:   United Kingdom
Dimensions:   Height: 198mm,  Width: 129mm,  Spine: 9mm
Weight:   134g
ISBN:   9780241544259
ISBN 10:   0241544254
Series:   Penguin Modern Classics
Pages:   176
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active

Dambudzo Marechera was born in 1952 in Vengere, the township of Rusape, in the east of what was then Rhodesia. He was the third of nine children in a family which became destitute once his father was killed in a road accident in 1966. he gained a scholarship to study at New College, Oxford, where he was sent down in 1976 to live out his exile in Britain in a succession of squats for another six years. He hammered out the first draft of The House of Hunger on his portable typewriter in a matter of weeks. It won the Guardian First Novel Prize and was translated into six languages. Marechera died in 1987 after being diagnosed with AIDS.

Reviews for The House of Hunger

A profound, even if exaggeratedly self-aware writer, an instinctive nomad and bohemian in temperament, Marechera was a writer in constant quest for his real self -- Wole Soyinka It is rare to find a writer for whom imaginative fiction is such a passionate and intimate process of engagement with the world. A terrible beauty is born out of the urgency of his vision -- Angela Carter The metaphors are simultaneously so uncliched and so apt that he reinvigorates the language -- China Mieville on THE BOOKS THAT MADE ME Like overhearing a scream -- Doris Lessing A writer who considered fiction a 'form of combat', his work is complex, challenging - and uniquely potent -- Chris Power * The Guardian *


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