‘No, I don’t hate being black. I’m just tired of saying it’s beautiful. No, I don’t hate myself. I’m just tired of people bruising their knuckles on my jaw.’

A novella with the force of a screaming trumpet flare, Dambudzo Marechera’s seminal literary debut explores a body and spirit exiled from the land and the self. An inimitable and internationally admired writer, his profound ambivalence and wry, existential sensibility was forged in this iconic book.

This book, first published in 1984, was created following Marechera's return to Zimbabwe after several years absense. Comprising three plays, a prose narrative, a collection of poems, and a park-bench diary, the book criticizes the materialism, intolerance, opportunism, and corruption of post-independence Zimbabwe, extending the political debate beyond the question of nationalism to embrace genuine social regeneration.

'One of African literature's most fascinating and unorthodox figures' Brian Chikwava 'When all else fails, don't take it in silence: scream like hell, scream like Jericho was tumbling down, serenaded by a brace of trombones, scream' Dambudzo Marechera burst onto the literary scene in 1978 with this vivid roar of a book exploring township life in pre-independence Zimbabwe. Rejecting what he saw as the narrow stereotypes of African literature, Marechera's stories portrayed a world flashing with violence and anarchic humour, as his narrator expresses his desperate alienation - from his family, from his student friends, from Zimbabwe itself. 'A writer who considered fiction a "form of combat", complex, challenging - and uniquely potent' Guardian 'Like overhearing a scream' Doris Lessing 'A terrible beauty is born out of the urgency of his vision' Angela Carter

Marechera made an immediate impact with the publication of The House of Hunger. The novella and nine short stories, most of them set in Zimbabwe, symbolise both home and country as the 'house of hunger', the place of madness and violence and despair. Marechera describes a world in which tenderness has long given way to the tactics of survival, and he does so in a style at once explosive and loaded with angry humour.