Author(s): NoViolet Bulawayo

Novel | Africa | 2023 Folio Prize short list | 2023 Women's Prize for Fiction long list

An effervescent, punchy, piercingly funny novel exploring the fall of Robert Mugabe from Booker-shortlisted Zimbabwean novelist NoViolet Bulawayo, Glory is an energy burst, an exhilarating ride. A bold, vivid chorus of animal voices calls out the dangerous absurdity of contemporary global politics, and helps us see our human world more clearly. A long time ago, in a bountiful land not so far away, the animal denizens lived quite happily. Then the colonisers arrived. After nearly a hundred years, a bloody War of Liberation brought new hope for the animals - along with a new leader. A charismatic horse who commanded the sun and ruled and ruled and kept on ruling. For forty years he ruled, with the help of his elite band of Chosen Ones, a scandalously violent pack of Defenders and, as he aged, his beloved and ambitious young donkey wife, Marvellous. But even the sticks and stones know there is no night ever so long it does not end with dawn. And so it did for the Old Horse, one day as he sat down to his Earl Grey tea and favorite radio programme. A new regime, a new leader. Or apparently so. And once again, the animals were full of hope . . . Glory tells the story of a country seemingly trapped in a cycle as old as time. And yet, as it unveils the myriad tricks required to uphold the illusion of absolute power, it reminds us that the glory of tyranny only lasts as long as its victims are willing to let it. History can be stopped in a moment. With the return of a long-lost daughter, a #freefairncredibleelection, a turning tide - even a single bullet.

Spellbinding . . . This social media-saturated narrative, interwoven with the oral storytelling techniques of idiomatic speech and call and response, makes Bulawayo feel like a pioneer . . . Glory, with a flicker of hope at its end, is allegory, satire and fairytale rolled into one mighty punch -- Sarah Ladipo Manyika * Guardian *
A brilliant, 400-page post-colonial fable . . . Bulawayo is really out-Orwelling Orwell. This is a satire with sharper teeth, angrier, and also very, very funny . . . this is also a satire in which female characters are not pushed to the margins, but hold he story together . . . Bulawayo dares us, and the citizens of all Jidadas everywhere, to reimagine what our nations could someday become -- Violet Kupersmith * New York Times Book Review *
An acerbic, precise, heart-rending and hilarious analysis of tyranny * Scotsman, *Summer Reads of 2022* *
I was very impressed indeed with NoViolet Bulawayo's debut . . . It is therefore a delight to be able to say that Bulawayo's new novel, Glory, is even better and radically different . . . acerbic, precise, heart-rending and hilarious . . . It is brave, and moving, as the citizens learn, slowly, to be unafraid. Bulawayo invites you to suspend disbelief in order that you believe -- Stuart Kelly * Scotsman *
Vital and universal -- Hepzibah Anderson * Observer *

Author Biography: NOVIOLET BULAWAYO grew up in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. When she was eighteen, she moved to Kalamazoo, Michigan. Her first novel, We Need New Names, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the Guardian First Book Award and the Barnes & Noble Discover Award, and won a Betty Trask Award, Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, Hurston-Wright Legacy Award, the Etisalat Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction. She has also won the Caine Prize for African Writing and a National Book Award's '5 Under 35'. NoViolet earned her MFA at Cornell University, and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, where she taught fiction. She currently writes full-time, from wherever she finds herself.