The House of Hunger

Joint winner of “The Guardian” Fiction Prize, this book is a collection of stories about growing up in Rhodesia.

Home and country are both the “house of hunger”, the place of madness and violence and despair. The boy is formed in a home where tenderness has long given way to the tactics of survival. is father is drunken, his mother constantly assaulted but enduring, his brother brutalised so that he beaves with his tender young woman in a precise repetition of the model he know. School is brutalising too; he remembers the beating of the weakest yet most obstinate of small boys when he sees his picture in the press, as a guerilla and a corpse. Sex is an instrument of domination, and a function of white domination. Township life is a prison, except to the whore, the police spy and the traitor. The hero goes to university, engages in political conflict, has an affair with a crippled white girl-each of them caught in the prison of race and colour. Both are beaten badly by white thugs, and the girl never recovers. His vulnerability is kept alive only by a nervous breakdown.