House of Stone
The True Story of a Family Divided in War-Torn Zimbabwe
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5.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
A powerful and intensely human insight into the civil war in Zimbabwe, focusing on a white farmer and his maid who find themselves on opposing sides.
One bright morning Nigel Hough, one of the few remaining white farmers in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, received the news he was dreading – a crowd were at the gate demanding he surrender his home and land. To his horror, his family's much-loved nanny Aqui was at the head of the violent mob that then stole his homestead and imprisoned him in an outhouse
By tracing the intertwined lives of Nigel and Aqui – rich and poor, white and black, master and maid – through intimate and moving interviews, Christina Lamb captures not just the source of a terrible conflict, but also her own conviction that there is still hope for one of Africa’s most beautiful countries.
Reviews
‘Lamb is a careful observer, and her anguished refrain is the terrible schizophrenia of people who fiercely love their land but do nothing to save it…the strength is in the storytelling…it is a good piece of reportage…her book deserves to be read.' Daily Telegraph
‘A perceptive account of Zimbabwean history since the colonial days.’ Times Literary Supplement
'Riveting…Lamb's book tells a disaster story on a massive scale.' Daily Mail
'Compelling…Lamb has a remarkable pair of stories to tell, and does so extremely well.' The Spectator
About the author
Christina Lamb is Chief Foreign Correspondent at The Sunday Times. She has since been awarded Foreign Correspondent of the Year five times as well as Europe’s top war reporting prize, the Prix Bayeux and was recently given the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award by the Society of Editors. She is the bestselling author of ten books including Farewell Kabul, The Africa House, and The Sewing Circles of Herat and co-wrote the international bestseller I am Malala with Malala Yousafzai and The Girl from Aleppo with Nujeen Mustafa. Her last book Our Bodies, Their Battlefields won the first Pilecki Institute award for war reporting and was shortlisted for Britain's top non-fiction award, the Baillie Gifford Prize, as well as the Orwell Prize and the New York Public Library Bernstein award. She is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, an Honorary Fellow of University College Oxford and was made an OBE in 2013.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Two very different lives run in parallel in award-winning British journalist Lamb's riveting account of Zimbabwe's brutal civil war in the 1970s, "the elation of becoming the last British colony in Africa to win independence ... and then the descent into madness." By alternating chapters from the perspectives of Aqui Shamvi, a poor black woman, and Nigel Hough, a wealthy white man, Lamb (The Africa House) brings both the personal and the political home to the reader. Her level tone and everyday language make the dramatic story all the more compelling. Though Aqui and Nigel are linked for a few years by her employment as his children's nanny, their lives mostly move along very separate paths as black Africans are dispossessed by the colonialist Land Acts, urban black quarters are demolished under President Robert Mugabe's orders and violent squatters occupy white-owned land. Lamb's indictment of Mugabe and his African enforcers and European enablers is complete; however, she achieves remarkable balance and demonstrates an extraordinary capacity to take the reader into the racism- and colonialism-torn worlds of two decent people, neither at home in their native land.
