September 2009: Brian Chikwava's 'Harare North'

Harare North offers a view of London from a Zimbabwean migrant's perspective. As the third book in our Free the Word! World Book Club series, Chikwava's tale begins with the unnamed narrator arriving in London as an illegal immigrant who hopes to make enough money to pay off his debts and return to Zimbabwe. As he watches the economy turn and the Zimbabwean dollar drop, the story becomes one of survival amongst London's underworld. Despite the realistic struggles the novel depicts, Chikwava has been acclaimed for his witty and humorous writing style. Chikwava says, 'I wasn't really trying to get people to feel sorry for them [the illegal immigrant population] or eliciting any sympathy, but just as a way of saying, here is a different life.'

‘From first page to last, the vernacular narrative of Harare North is arresting, haunting, exciting, funny. Come to this novel with an open mind and, as well as giving you much to ponder about the nature of right and wrong, exile and belonging, it will surely make you go kak kak kak.' Margaret Busby in The Independent

 

Brian Chikwava was born in Bulawayo in 1972. He studied civil engineering at Bristol University and is a fellow at University of East Anglia. In 2004, he became the first Zimbabwean to win the Caine Prize for African Writing for Seventh Street Alchemy, a story about a prostitute living in Harare. He currently lives in London.

 

 

 

Each month International PEN's Book Club will feature a book selected from those presented at International PEN's Literary Festivals around the world. For more information please check the Literary Events section of this website. The festivals celebrate writing around the globe, and International PEN hopes to encourage reading across borders. In April, Brian participated in this year's Free the Word! festival in London. She has provided reader's notes exclusively for the Free the Word! World Book Club which explore both the context of Harare North as well as offering a personal insight into the story.

Here are some potential areas for conversation and discussion of Harare North below:

How reliable do you find the narrator?

How effective do you feel the portrayal of a diaspora community is?

Character and place are fundamentally linked in the book - how does the perception of London/Brixton change as the character unravels?