Rotten Row: Petina Gappah - Softcover

Gappah's short stories depict contemporary Zimbabwe as a place of both reassuring normality and unnerving extremes. She exposes the venality, criminality and hypocrisy, but always with mordant humour. (Rebecca Rose Financial Times Books of the Year)

Intelligent, witty and incisive. (The Times)

Does for Harare now what Dickens did for Victorian London, with lethal comic relish and rage. (Helen Simpson Observer 'Books of the Year')

Stories that throb with life and meaning. (Stylist)

Gappah's narratives have a resilient lightness and bounce. (Phil Baker Sunday Times)

Gappah's writing is intelligent, witty and incisive. (Kate Saunders The Times)

It is just after nine o'clock in the morning. Gidza will die in exactly forty-three minutes and thirteen seconds. 'Rotten Row' is the Criminal Division of Harare, and the courts and the unfortunates who pass through them are the subjects of this mesmerising collection of stories. In these portraits of lives aching for meaning and redemption, Petina Gappah crosses the barriers of class, race, gender and sexual politics in contemporary Zimbabwe, to explore the causes and effects of crime and the nature of justice.