Mukoma wa Ngugi / Mrs Shaw / Review

 

MRS. SHAW

By Mukowa wa Ngugi

In the East African Kwatee Republic of the 1990s, the dictatorship is about to fall, and the nation’s exiles are preparing to return.

• Series: Modern African Writing Series
• Hardcover: 200 pages
• Publisher: Ohio University Press (July 8, 2015)
• Language: English

 

One of these exiles, a young man named Kalumba, is a graduate student in the United States, where he encounters Mrs. Shaw, a professor emerita and former British settler who fled Kwatee’s postcolonial political and social turmoil. Kalumba’s girlfriend, too, is an exile: a Puerto Rican nationalist like her imprisoned father, she is an outcast from the island. Brought together by a history of violence and betrayals, all three are seeking a way of regaining their humanity, connecting with each other, and learning to make a life in a new land. Kalumba and Mrs. Shaw, in particular, are linked by a past rooted in colonial and postcolonial oppression, yet they are separated by their differing accounts of what really happened.

The memory of each is subject to certain lapses, whether selective or genuine. Even when they agree on the facts—be they acts of love, of betrayal, or of violence—each narrator shapes the story in his own way, by what is left in and what is left out, by what is remembered and what is forgotten.

REVIEWS

“Mukoma wa Ngugi is a deft, poised storyteller who has mastered the art of sweeping up the reader. From the first page of Mrs. Shaw I found myself hooked, in awe, riveted. Here’s a sad, gripping and highly entertaining romp of a novel.”
--Okey Ndibe, author of Foreign Gods, Inc. and Arrows of Rain

“Mukoma Wa Ngugi’s latest publication, Mrs. Shaw, is a work of astonishing imagination, blending the real with the surreal to explore the plight of a political activist, Kalumba, who is returning to his fictional homeland, Kwatee, following years of exile in America. The book grips the reader’s attention from start to finish, using twists, turns, and surprises in a plot laced with intrigue, suspense, tension, and passion.”
--Mῖcere Gῖthae Mũgo, author of Writing and Speaking from the Heart of My Mind and My Mother’s Poem and Other Songs

MUKOMA WA NGUGI