From 2022 Windham Campbell Prize winner Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu
Book 2 in the City of Kings trilogy, including her multiple
award-winning debut novel The Theory of Flight
Set in a southern African country that is never named, this powerful
tale of human fallibility--told with empathy, generosity, and a light
touch--is an excursion into the interiority of the colonizer.
Emil Coetzee, a civil servant in his fifties, is washing blood off his
hands when the ceasefire is announced. Like everyone else, he feels
unmoored by the end of the conflict. War had given him his sense of
purpose, his identity. But why has Emil's life turned out so different
from his parents', who spent cheery Friday evenings flapping and
flailing the Charleston or dancing the foxtrot? What happened to the
Emil who used to wade through the singing elephant grass of the
savannah, losing himself in it?
Continuing the interconnected stories she began in her award-winning
novel The Theory of Flight, Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu explores decades of
history through the eyes of one man on his journey from boyhood to
manhood, and the changes that befall him through love, loss, and war.
With sympathy, complexity, and penetrating insight, The History of Man
explores what makes a man, a father, and a nation.
