Harare Review of Books

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✍🏾 Jacqueline Nyathi, librocubicularist, friendly neighbourhood "You *Must* Read This" person. 📝📚 @thecontinent.org, @strangehorizons.bsky.social etc (Incidentally, also @shonatiger.hararereview.com)

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Harare Review of Books@hararereview· 22d

For the latest @thecontinent.org, which you can download here (pdf): www.thecontinent.org/_files/ugd/2...

A screenshot from The Continent

The Continent 18 JULY 2026 | ISSUE 245 p31
TC BOOK REVIEW
by jacqueline nyathi

Heirs, and Grace’s

When the past you’ve been running from comes knocking, how do you open the door?

CHIKA UNIGWE’S novel Grace opens
with the eponymous protagonist seated
at her kitchen table, eating a cake that
she feels tastes like mud.
She engages in ritual penance: 26
years ago, a teenaged Grace abandoned
her newborn by the side of the road at
the instigation of her parents, who
allowed her to secretly carry to term
and then coerced her to “take care of it”.
Every year since, Grace has marked
the child’s birthday by forcing down
more cake than she can eat.
Even though she’s now reasonably
happily married with a thriving set
of twins, her current family remains
oblivious of this history; she told them
her parents were dead.
Grace now runs a clinic that operates
as a “baby factory” – not for the
maternity services it offers its clients,
but because, on the side, Grace matches
women who want to give up their babies
with parents who will pay handsomely.
Despite the lingering memories of
shame, heartbreak, and loss, Grace
feels she’s done the best she can with
the hand she’s been dealt. That is, until
her mother shows up at her house.
In many African countries, pregnant
teenage girls are still prevented from
continuing with school. While there’s
been some patchy progress, generally,
societal attitudes have yet to catch up.
In her highly engaging novel, Unigwe
considers how such girls are failed by
their families and by society while the
boy or man involved gets away with
essentially no consequences.
Unigwe imagines the fate of an
outwardly successful woman carrying
deep wounds decades later.
The exposure of Grace’s secret leads
to a great personal crisis that initially
unbalances her – but in this story, at
least, the “disgraced” girl finally finds
her happy ending.

Harare Review of Books@hararereview· 22d

This week for The Sunday Long Read: The Age of Calamities by Senaa Ahmad. @henryholtbooks.bsky.social mailchi.mp/sundaylongre...

The Age of Calamities:
By Senaa Ahmad
What do Henry VIlI, Anne Boleyn, Napoleon, Genghis Khan's wolves, Joan of Arc, Blackbeard, John Adams, Nefertiti, Marilyn Monroe, Queen Victoria, Ibn Battuta, Empress Alexandra's daughters, Julius Caesar, and Lizzie Borden have in common? They're all protagonists in Senaa Ahmad's short story collection. They're not necessarily in familiar settings either: Caesar visits New York; and Victoria, Adams, Monroe, Battuta and Nefertiti are all guests at a rather spooky dinner party. Anne Boleyn keeps coming back to life, no matter how many ways Henry finds to kill her. Napoleon is - well, many Napoleons who keep popping into existence ('In the end, the Napoleons rented a gangly house near the edge of town").
There's something cheeky about Ahmad's collection - in the best way. History's often stuffy, prim, and excessively rigid in the Western tradition; Ahmad's irreverence reminds us that history is really just story, often, unfortunately, written to glorify big men (and women). Ahmad's re-imagination in this anthology brings the human back to these heroes and anti-heroes, and entertains while doing it. A very fun read.

Harare Review of Books@hararereview· Jul 7

Also in @thesundaylongread.bsky.social of June 28, 2026:

Text from screenshot:

The Sunday Book
Curated by Jacqueline Nyathi

Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump
By Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan
One can't read this account of President Trump's second term without feeling wholly aghast at the sheer hubris of the man, born of a toxic combination of his self-belief and his delusions of persecution. But Trump says something revealing and difficult to dispute, quoted at the end of the book: "They illegally indicted me, they impeached me, they did everything-they shot me, I guess you could say. But I won the election in a landslide.
Nobody else could've done it [..] And there's only one thing you can say about me that anybody believes, and you know what that is. [...] Essentially I won every f--ing time."
Not many could sift through the bewildering morass of detail-stories, news, court cases, scandals, outright lies, trolling, rumour, confusion-produced by the Trump administration, and the associated, astonishing rise of his MAGA movement, to pull off such a compelling and gripping narrative but Haberman and Swan have. Regime Change, a contender for the best non-fiction book you'll read this year, is full of incredibly rich detail, some of it bemusing - like Trump wielding superglue to affix gold decorations above the mantel in the Oval Office.
Trump's been fearless, in his second term, about ignoring systems and conventions underlying the so-called rules-based international order. And there have been no personal consequences, kind of justifying his behavior. What all this implies for the future of the US- and the world, should the rest of us continue to depend on US power- is beyond alarming; but the conclusion cannot be avoided: the old world has died, and a new one is born.

Maybe there will indeed be monuments to Donald Trump; still, what a student of human history might imagine is two vast and trunkless legs of stone in the desert.

Jacqueline Nyathi has loved books for as long as she can reme…

Harare Review of Books@hararereview· Jun 25

🥹

Some of the billionaires were in for a surprise, with special Trump-style entertainment planned. Often before meals started, the President-elect cued a rousing version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” on his iPad, piped through the club’s sound system. Before dinner, Zuckerberg rose to his feet, hand on his heart.But this was no ordinary national anthem. Not only because Trump’s own reading of the Pledge of Allegiance had been spliced into the music, or because the recording ended in a chant of “U-S-A! U-S-A!” but because it was performed by the “J6 Prison Choir,” twenty men detained for their alleged involvement in the attack on the Capitol. Here was Trump’s pointed way of enlisting some of the country’s most powerful business leaders in his campaign to rehabilitate the rioters; to transform them into martyrs and patriots in service to his own holy cause, the 2020 election.

Harare Review of Books@hararereview· Jun 23

What an age! Every one is dying, everything is dying, and the earth is dying also, eaten up by the sun and the wind. I don't know where I get the courage to keep on living in the midst of these ruins. Let us love each other to the end.
George Sand
Letter to Gustave Flaubert
27th June 1870

Harare Review of Books@hararereview· Jun 18

😊

James Kinsley @unclekins.bsky.social • 17h
Whelp, it's officially the third highest year for traffic on my website (visits and visitors) and we're only midway through June. That's a thing.

Moby Dick @mobydickatsea.bsky.social • 17h
• Bluesky Elder
In less than half a minute, this entire thing happened.

Harare Review of Books@hararereview· Jun 17

Sharing something cool I have in #Obsidianmd where I track my reading: a Gantt chart of the books I've read (I'm that kind of nerd)

Screenshot of part of a mermaid Gantt chart of the books I've read in 2026 showing how long I took to read on a timeline

Harare Review of Books@hararereview· Jun 17

Nasty work

A screenshot of the weather from Google: currently 9 deg, feels like 7

Harare Review of Books@hararereview· Jun 8

😊

'T hope you don't mind me asking,' said Guillam, but just how old are you, George?'
Smiley turned a blank face towards his friend. 'Age does
not touch me. I am the undying vampire, older than men, older than the trees, younger only than the bare rocks of the mountains. I feed on the blood of the innocent and renew myself eternally. In medieval Hungary I was Szmilágyi the Impaler; in Imperial China I reigned for a century as Sma Li the Terrible. In cave-man days 1 hunted my human prey saddled upon a sabre-toothed Smilodon. I am the undying nightmare of humankind. I do not age.'
'Righto, said Guillam.

Harare Review of Books@hararereview· Jun 4

Seems new

Harare Review of Books@hararereview· Jun 1

Part of the problem is that reading one book just begat more books I wanted to read. When I got to the end of nonfiction books, I scanned the bibliography to look for other titles I hadn’t heard of. Other times, I read one book by an author, fell in love, and wanted to read everything else they’d written. On occasion simply telling my friends about one book I’d finished prompted recommendation for other books that were similar. I suspected that even if I could read faster, I would just wind up with even more books I wanted to read. It was an exponential issue.

Harare Review of Books@hararereview· May 31

For this week's @thesundaylongread.bsky.social

Harare Review of Books@hararereview· May 26

Pub day for this, which looks great! Reactionary Worldbuilding: From Speculative Imagination to Political Practice. Edited by Anindita Banerjee, Sherryl Vint, David M. Higgins and Jordan S. Carroll From @mitpress.bsky.social