Bones is a powerful, heart-rending novel that provides a sensitive evocation of Marita, a farm worker, whose only son joined the freedom fighters in Zimbabwe's war of liberation. He does not return after the war and Marita is determined to find him or find out what happened to him. This is perhaps a single clear theme in a landscape where women, particularly the poor and the marginalised, suffer many layers of oppression. Marita's courage and endurance are reconstructed through the memories of those who knew her in a language steep in poetry and Shona idiom. Bones , which won the Noma Award in 1989, was Chenjerai Hove's first novel in English.