Guava Jam

The Salem Inn sits at a crossroads in the Eastern Cape, where Lucy, new to the country, finds herself alone one weekend. A knock on the door and a request for help shifts her notion of friendship, motherhood, and hospitality, while new life percolates inside her. An unexpected trip to Joza and back is not only unsettling, but could be life-changing.

"Attree crafts a poignant, moving story with a strong sense of place. Like good guava jam, the prose lingers on the palate long after reading."

— Tendai Huchu, author of The Hairdressers of Harare.

"In 'Guava Jam', Lizzy Attree has astonishingly managed to connect two contested homelands, Kurdistan, and the Eastern Cape, still menaced by the lingering evidence of past colonial settler injustices. Although Lucy, the protagonist and narrator at the centre of it all, is a Londoner, a sojourner in the former British settler territory of Salem, Eastern Cape, she is all softness (yet not a soft touch), the epitome of empathy, which is to say Ubuntu. This is a wonderful, accomplished story set in a former empire territory, whose British sun has long since long set, but whose inhabitants can't escape its scalding shadows."

— Percy Zvomuya, editor of When Three Sevens Clash and author of The Black Victorian (forthcoming October '26).

"A quietly touching slice of life story about a woman on the brink of transformation amidst unfamiliar emotional and geographical terrain. Lizzy Attree evokes both the crossing of multicultural lives and loneliness in London and the specificity of rural life in the Eastern Cape with elegance, sharp detail and humour."

— Efemia Chela, contributing editor Johannesburg Review of Books.

"Weaving between South Africa and London to map the fraught borders of empathy, 'Guava Jam' is a quiet and devastating look at the limits of transient connections and the fierce, isolating instinct of motherhood. Written with vivid characterisation and emotional depth, it's an unsentimental tale of the enduring search for belonging."

— Brian Chikwava, author of Shamiso.

Lizzy Attree is the co-founder of the Safal Kiswahili Prize for African Literature and works as Trusts Officer at the Terrence Higgins Trust. She has a PhD from SOAS, University of London and Blood on the Page, her collection of interviews with the first African writers to write about HIV and AIDS from Zimbabwe and South Africa, was published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing in 2010. She was UK Director on the board of Short Story Day Africa 2018 - 2023 and was the Director of the Caine Prize from 2014 to 2018. In 2015, she taught African literature at Kings College, London and has since taught at Goldsmiths College and Richmond, the American International University in London 2018-2025. She is the Producer of Thinking Outside the Penalty Box, an African Footballers project partnering with Chelsea and Arsenal, funded by Arts Council England and supported by the Poetry Society, and a freelance writer, reviewer, and critic.

The ZamaShort imprint series is solely focused on the amazing powerhouse that is the short story. We give each short story its own publication so that it may be read and enjoyed fully as a stand-alone publication. As per the StoryTime Publishing mandate initialised in 2007, ZamaShort continues to champion and add to the ever-growing canon of African literature excellence and diversity.