Vera exploits language to peel away the skin of public and private lives. In Butterfly Burning she captures the ebullience and the bitterness of township life, as well as the strength and courage of her unforgettable heroine. Butterfly Burning brings the brilliantly poetic voice of Zimbabwean writer Yvonne Vera to American readers for the first time. Set in Makokoba, a black township, in the late l940s, the novel is an intensely bittersweet love story. When Fumbatha, a construction worker, meets the much younger Phephelaphi, he "wants her like the land beneath his feet from which birth had severed him." He in turn fills her "with hope larger than memory." But Phephelaphi is not satisfied with their "one-room" love alone. The qualities that drew Fumbatha to her, her sense of independence and freedom, end up separating them. And the closely woven fabric of township life, where everyone knows everyone else, has a mesh too tight and too intricate to allow her to escape her circumstances on her own. Zimbabwean Vera has received wide acclaim in her homeland but is relatively unknown in the United States, where her work has appeared in an anthology and through a small press. Her latest novel is a rare work of beauty, capturing the oft-tragic poetry of life in a black township of Rhodesia in the 1940s. Surrounded by poverty and oppression, where blacks are not even permitted to walk on the pavement, young Phephelaphi searches for her own freedom and fulfillment in spite of the love of Fumbatha, a construction worker more than twice her age. Vera's phrasing and style make mundane tasks like cutting tall grass or waiting for a train sing with a music all their own and give a simple story of love, longing, and betrayal a lyric quality. Readers of Isabel Allende, A.S. Byatt, or Toni Morrison will all enjoy this introduction to fine African literature. Highly recommended.DEllen Flexman, Indianapolis-Marion Cty. P.L. Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. Zimbabwean Vera makes her U.S. debut with this challenging, lyrical novel. Set in a township in 1940s Rhodesia, the story centers on the passionate love of Fumbatha and younger, ethereally beautiful Phephelaphi, whom Fumbatha pulls "out of the water like a fish" when they meet at the river. The couple moves to a one-room asbestos shack, but eventually Phephelaphi grows restless, acutely feeling the limitations of poverty and racism--of being a woman of color in colonial times. Her desire to transcend the township is so strong that when pregnancy threatens to bar her from nursing school, she gives herself an abortion--a graphic, nearly unbearably tragic scene that ultimately unearths devastating lies between her and Fumbatha. Experimental and difficult, the book's stream-of-consciousness style is wild and poetic. More meditative than plot based, the narrative whirls around its own axis with the ecstatic abandon of a Sufi dervish, circling back to places in the story until it reaches a horrifying conclusion. Readers who stay with Vera's shocking yet beautiful book won't soon forget it. Gillian Engberg Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved “Vera makes the novel new in Africa.” ― Mandivavarira Taruvinga, Independent Extra (Zimbabwe) “From the oral poetic tradition comes a new young writer, and we hail this arrival as we do the raincloud in the heat of day . . . Butterfly Burning is as passionate, volatile, loving, terrible, clear and confusing as any novel could be.” ― Nikki Giovanni “A remarkable novel . . . Keen, vivid. The author's political sense, her critique of colonialism, is intrinsic, never intrusive . . . Vera writes gracefully, depicting with extraordinary elegance the chaos and disorder of township life, the surreal conditions of existence imposed by colonial authority upon the residents.” ― Michelle Cliff, Village Voice Literary Supplement “Written in lyrical, metaphor-laden, heavily symbolic prose, this mesmerizing first U. S. appearance of Vera's work is sure to garner attention.” ― Publishers Weekly “A rare work of beauty, capturing the oft-tragic poetry of life in a black township in Rhodesia in the 1940s . . . Vera's phrasing and style [give this] story of love, longing, and betrayal a lyric quality . . . Readers of Isabel Allende, A. S. Byatt, or Toni Morrison will all enjoy this introduction to fine African literature. Highly recommended.” ― Ellen Flexman, Library Journal “This author is an unflinching guide, and if you trust her to take you off-road, she'll show you an exquisite piece of unmapped landscape.” ― Anderson Tepper, Time Out (New York) Yvonne Vera is one of Zimbabwe's best known authors. She was born in Bulawayo, where she now works as the director of the National Gallery. Her novels include Without a Name, and Under the Tongue, which recevied the 1997 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Africa region). Butterfly Burning one There is a pause. An expectation.They play a refrain on handmade guit