Rotten Row - Softcover

Petina Gappah is a favourite of ours at Emerald Street. Her novel The Book of Memory was our number one book of last year and she gave a hugely interesting and funny talk at The Emerald Street Literary Festival back in June... Rotten Row is a collection of short stories, based loosely around the road of the same name in Harare, Zimbabwe, the site of the city's criminal Magistrates' Courts.Every single one of them has a thoughtful structure that contains pulsing life. (Anna Fielding Emerald Street)

Both absorbing in their way, it's Gappah's Rotten Row that wins for its stories that throb with life and meaning. (Stylist, Book Wars)

A distinctive quality of Gappah's fiction is that, while the events she depicts are invariably tragic, the writing itself feels upbeat, excited. Describing the Radiohead song "Creep", the music critic Alex Ross once write: "the lyrics may be saying , 'I'm a creep.' but the music is saying, 'I am majestic.'" A similar tension informs Gappah's work: although her stories depict a despair-inducing world, the spiritedness of her writing makes them seem almost gleeful...In Rotten Row, Gappah has found a way of reconciling trenchant social criticism with the needs of entertainment - and the result, for the most part, is genuinely brilliant. (William Skidelsky Financial Times)

It is the unfortunate burden of African writers that their work is often reduced to representation: as though they existed to describe and diagnose the state of their home countries, or worse, the entire continent. Yet this burden, in the hands of a brilliant writer, can be an opportunity. In Rotten Row Petina Gappah, who won the Guardian first book award in 2009 for her collection of stories An Elegy for Easterly, has produced a beautiful, sweeping collection that illuminates various aspects of contemporary Zimbabwean life...But Rotten Row's real importance as a collection is that it does the purest work of fiction, and does it well...Rotten Row hums with life, and it delivers one of the keenest and simplest pleasures fiction has to offer: a feeling of true intimacy, of total immersion, in situations not our own, in the selves of others. (FT Kola Guardian)

However grim the subjects, Gappah's narratives have a resilient lightness and bounce. (Phil Baker Sunday Times)

Gappah's writing is intelligent, witty and incisive. (Kate Saunders The Times)

Does for Harare now what Dickens did for Victorian London, with lethal comic relish and rage. (Helen Simpson Observer Books of the Year)

Gappah's short stories depict contemporary Zimbabwe as a place of both reassuring normality and unnerving extremes. She exposes the venality, criminality and hypocrisy, but always with mordant humour. As the FT's reviewer put it: "Gappah has found a way of reconciling trenchant social criticism with the needs of entertainment - the result is brilliant. (Rebecca Rose The Financial Times Books of the Year)

Zimbabwe's sexual politics prove all too familiar in Petina Gappah's questing collection, Rotten Row. Her debut, An Elegy for Easterly, won the Guardian first book award in 2009, and these new tales reach back to her roots in law... their energy is irresistible. (Stuart Dybek Observer)

Petina Gappah returns with another collection of stories, exploring modern Zimbabwe