Petina Gappah newest novel Out of Darkness, Shining Light will be making a landfall in the US market in 2019. This will be the Zimbabwe author’s second novel and fourth book.
Petina Gappah is one of the writers that have made a name for herself in a big way in the last decade. She emerged when her first short story collection An Elegy for Easterly was published in 2009 and won the Guardian First Book Award in the same year. We here at JamesMurua.com, like everyone human who encountered that book, absolutely loved it.
Her next book was The Book of Memory, which came out in 2015, would immediately find itself on the longlist for the Baileys Women’s Prize of 2016. That, her first novel, follows Memory an albino woman languishing in Chikurubi Maximum Security Prison in Harare, Zimbabwe, where she has been convicted of murder. Her lawyer convinces her to writes her experience as she remembers it. That was followed in 2016 by Rotten Row her second short story collection.
Publishing industry hub Publishers Weekly in their book deals of the past week are reporting that the authors agent has sold the North American rights, at auction, to two books—a novel called Out of Darkness, Shining Light and a short story collection called Rotten Row. We are familiar with Rotten Row but this other one is a new one to us. The novel is said to be about the last days of Scottish explorer and missionary David Livingstone, as well as the journey of his body from Zambia back to England.
The publisher added that the book is “narrated by his sharp-tongued cook, Halima, and a repressed African missionary, Jacob Wainwright,” and tells the tale of “this harrowing 1,500-mile journey.” Out of Darkness is set for a summer 2019 release in the US. There is no information on when we here on the continent will be able to access this book at this point.
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