Shimmer Chinodya

Winner of the 1989 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Africa region), Shimmer Chinodya is one of Zimbabwe's foremost fiction writers. This collection of short stories reveals his development as a writer of passionate questioning integrity.

The first stories, Hoffman Street and The Man who Hanged Himself, capture the bewildered innocence of a child's view of the adult world, where behaviour is often puzzling and contradictory; stories such as Going to See Mr B.V. provide the transition between the world of the adult and that of the child where the latter is required to act for himself in a situation where illusions founder on a narrow reality.

Among the Dead and Brothers and Sisters look wryly at the self-conscious, self-centred, desperately serious world of young adulthood while Playing your Cards, The Waterfall, Strays, and Bramson introduce characters for whom ambition, disillusion, and disappointment jostle for attention in a world where differences of class, culture, race, and morality come to the fore.

Finally, in Can we Talk, we conclude with an abrasive, lucid, sinewy voice which explores the nature of estrangement. The charge is desolation. Can we Talk and Other Stories speaks of the unspoken and unsaid. The child who watches but does not understand, the young man who observes but cannot participate, the man who stands outside not sure where his desires and ambitions lead, the older man, estranged by his own choices.

Can we Talk is not a question but a statement that insists on being heard, and demands a reassessment of our dreams.