The groundbreaking first novel in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s award-winning trilogy, Nervous Conditions won the Commonwealth Writers Prize and has been “hailed as one of the 20th century’s most significant works of African literature” (The New
York Times). Two decades before Zimbabwe would win independence and ended white minority rule, thirteen-year-old Tambudzai Sigauke embarks on her education. On her shoulders rest the economic hopes of her parents, siblings, and
extended family, and within her burns the desire for independence. She yearns to be free of the constraints of her rural village and thinks she’s found her way out when her wealthy uncle offers to sponsor her schooling. But she soon learns that
the education she receives at his mission school comes with a price.

This new edition brings to readers the unforgettable beginnings of Tambu, her cousin Nyasha, and other characters who appear later in life in Dangarembga’s Booker-shortlisted This Mournable Body. A timeless coming-of-age tale, and a
powerful exploration of cultural imperialism, Nervous Conditions charts Tambu’s journey to personhood in a fledgling nation.

The Book of Not continues the saga of Tambudzai, picking up where Nervous Conditions left off. As Tambu begins secondary school at the Young Ladies’ College of the Sacred Heart, she is still reeling from the personal losses that war has
inflicted upon her family–her uncle and sister were injured in a mine explosion. Soon she’ll come face to face with discriminatory practices at her mostly white school. And when she graduates and begins a job at an advertising agency, she
realizes that the political and historical forces that threaten to destroy the fabric of her community are outside the walls of the school as well. Tsitsi Dangarembga, honored with the 2021 PEN Award for Freedom of Expression, digs deep into the
damage colonialism and its education system does to Tambu’s sense of self amid the struggle for Zimbabwe’s independence, resulting in a brilliant and incisive second novel.

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.