City of Kings trilogy bundle
Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
From 2022 Windham Campbell Prize winner Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu, the complete collection of her multiple award-winning City of Kings trilogy, including The Theory of Flight, The History of Man, and The Quality of Mercy
“Perhaps the most monumental trilogy to come out of Southern Africa” (Afrocritik)
In The Theory of Flight,Ndlovu sketches decades of history in an unnamed Southern African nation through the story of Imogen “Genie” Zula Nyoni, who lies in a coma after battling a long illness. As loved ones struggle to come to terms with their impending loss, Ndlovu recounts the lives of Genie’s forebears from colonial occupation through the freedom struggle.
In The History of Man, Ndlovu takes an excursion into the interiority of the colonizer. Emil Coetzee, a civil servant in his fifties, is left unmoored by the end of his country’s civil war. His journey from boyhood to manhood, and the changes that befall him through love, loss, and war, will leave a path of bloodshed in his wake.
In The Quality of Mercy, Spokes Moloi, the first black chief inspector in the City of Kings, investigates the possible murder of Emil Coetzee, the notorious head of the Organization of Domestic Affairs. In examining Emil’s disappearance, Spokes has one last opportunity to solve the decades-old murder case that determined both the path of his life and destiny of his country.
“Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu is both a chronicler and a conjurer whose soaring imagination creates a Zimbabwean past made of anguish and hope, of glory and despair: the story of the generations born at the crossroads of a country's history.” — 2022 Windham Campbell Prize committee
“P]erhaps the most monumental trilogy to come out of Southern Africa. Only time will tell. What is clear now is that Ndlovu’s professorial knowledge is evident in her masterly storytelling. [...] It is a story that deserves to endure into posterity." — Afrocritik
"Ndlovu impresses with a fresh and astute perspective on colonialism, race, and family.” — Publishers Weekly
“[A] prodigious, time-stopping concerto that decisively places Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu on the global stage. A writer to watch.” —NoViolet Bulawayo, author of We Need New Names
“[A] joyful tapestry of characters shaped but never deformed by the tensions of the times they traverse, narrated in prose of devastatingly beautiful simplicity.” — Tsitsi Dangarembga, Booker Prize shortlisted author of Nervous Conditions and This Mournable Body
“An unnamed country in the southern part of Africa springs to life in this delicate work of magical realism. […] Unlike anything you’ve read before.” — Bustle
Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu is a writer, filmmaker and academic who holds a PhD in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University, as well as master’s degrees in African Studies and Film. She has published research on Saartjie Baartman and she wrote, directed and edited the award-winning short film Graffiti. Born in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, she worked as a teacher in Johannesburg before returning to Bulawayo. Her first novel, The Theory of Flight won the Barry Ronge Fiction Prize in South Africa. In 2022, Siphiwe was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction. In 2023, her story "The Postman" in the Yale Review, based on a character in her novel The Quality of Mercy, was nominated for the American Society of Magazine Editors Award.