My lucky dip from the TBR Book Jar this month has offered me a choice between a novel set in Wales, one from Brazil and a Booker prize contender set in Zimbabwe.
Thicker Than Water by Bethan Darwin
Bethan’s novel is one of the many, many titles I’ve bought from the independent Welsh press, Honno in recent years. This one is a tale of a Canadian company that plans to set up a shirt manufacturing base in a Welsh valley that is struggling with high levels of unemployment and despair. For the head of a Cardiff law company, asked to help get the new enterprise off the ground, the plan will create turmoil as the history of some older family members comes to light.
Antonio by Beatriz Bracher
Bracher is a Brazilian author who has published four novels (though only two have been translated into English) as well as short stories and film screenplays. Antonio focuses on the attempts by Benjamin to get to the truth about a tragic family secret. The people most closely involved are all dead so he has to rely on the memories of their friends — but each of them tell a different version of the facts.
This Mournable Body by Tsitsi Dangarembga
This has been described as a tense and psychologically charged novel about a woman’s descent into poverty in modern Harare. Tambudzai is faced with fresh humiliation every time she things she has reached a turning point in her attempt to make a better life for herself. The painful contrast between the future she imagined and her daily reality ultimately drives her to a breaking point.
It’s Dangarembga’s second novel and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2020 but lost out to Shuggie Bain.
And the vote goes to …….
I’d be happy to read any of these three. I was very tempted to choose Antonio because a) it’s short and b) it’s years since I last read any author from Brazil. But This Mournable Body just nudged ahead because it gives me a chance to visit another country for my Adventures in African Literature project. Now all I have to do is to read this book by end of June.