Description
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.Author: Yvonne Vera
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 09/12/2000
Pages: 160
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.34lbs
Size: 8.20h x 5.51w x 0.47d
ISBN13: 9780374291860
ISBN10: 0374291861
BISAC Categories:
- Fiction | General
About the Author
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).