Dew in the Morning

by Shimmer Chinodya

Dew in the Morning was written when
the author, Shimmer Chinodya, was eighteen. The intensity of childhood
memory is sharp and immediate. Godi, the young boy whose life we
experience as he grows up, perceives more than he understands. The
ambivalence or instability of the text lies at the juncture between the
felt experience of the child, and the rational, interpretative, analysis
of the adult.

A Bildungsroman, Chinodya captures the centrality
of land in the national consciousness: its beauty, its rhythms, its
seasons and its fertility. But he does not romanticise the hardships:
the droughts, poor harvests, over-crowding – particularly as a result of
the inflow of resettled people – and the tensions over land and between
peoples as they struggle to survive. Good humour, strict morality, hard
work, and mutual support can be undermined by corrupt practice, or
tainted by traditional ceremonies that are as frightening as they are
powerful, and raise essential questions of belief and validity.

Dew in the Morning,
is a tender, evocative novel of growing up, but in it we see the seeds
of many issues which Chinodya will dwell on in his later novels:
familial tensions, the taut interplay of tradition and modernity,
ancestral beliefs and Christianity.

£18.00

About the author

Shimmer Chinodya

Shimmer
Chinodya was born in 1957 in Gweru, the second child in a large, happy
family. He studied English Literature and Education at the University of
Zimbabwe. After a spell teaching and with curriculum development, he
earned an MA in Creative Writing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (USA).
His first novel, Dew in the Morning, was published in 1982. This was
followed by Farai’s Girls (1984), Child of War (under the pen name B.
Chirasha, 1986), Harvest of Thorns (1989), Can We Talk and other
stories (1998), Tale of Tamari (2004), Chairman of Fools (2005), Strife
(2006), Tindo’s Quest (2011), Chioniso and other stories (2012) and
Harvest of Thorns Classic: A Play (2016). His work appears in numerous
anthologies. He has also written educational texts, training manuals,
radio and film scripts, including the script for the feature film,
Everyone’s Child. He has won many awards for his work, including the
Commonwealth Writers Prize (Africa Region) for Harvest of Thorns, a
Caine Prize shortlist for Can we Talk and the NOMA award for publishing
in Africa for Strife. He has won awards on many occasions from ZIWU,
ZBPA and NAMA. He has also received many fellowships abroad and from
1995 to 1997 was Distinguished Dana Professor in Creative Writing and
African Literature at the University of St Lawrence in upstate New York.