John Eppel at the Bulawayo Book Club

John Eppel will be at the Bulawayo Book Club on 29 November to discuss his novel Hatchings.

It is New Year in Bulawayo, and anybody who is anybody is out celebrating.

Based on Alexander Pope's dictum that 'those who are ashamed of nothing else are so of being ridiculous', Hatchings sets out to ridicule people of all races who abuse power - behind the pulpit, the podium, and the paint brush.

The novel, whose central metaphor is baby-dumping, is set on New Year's Eve for good reason: it's the time when powermongers are at their most self-indulgent, most exposed. It is precisely the time when we see how much alike they are. In Hatchings, this similarity between the left and the right, between church and state, between black and white - so obsessed with their own moral worthiness, so quick to inflict their sanctimony on us all - is demonstrated by the fact that they all, quite literally, dance to the same tune.

'Beneath the scurrility, this is a profoundly romantic novel, it tells of a touching love story between a young white couple who are saved from the prevailing Philistinism and corruption by two things - a love of English literature and a love of the Matopos.'

Terence Ranger in The Zimbabwean Review

'The book is about exploitation, meanness; and it's about loveliness'

Southern African Review of Books

amaBooks are fortunate to have published two novels, Hatchings and the translation into English of Ignatius Mabasa's Mapenzi as The Mad, that were chosen in the Times Literary Supplement as two of 'the most significant novels to have come out of Africa.