When Mr George loses his job teaching English at a private secondary school in Bulawayo, 'his pension payout, after forty years of full-time service, bought him two jam doughnuts and a soft tomato.'

When he backs his uninsured white Ford Escort into a brand new Mercedes Benz, the out-of-court settlement sees him giving up his house to the complainant, Beauticious Njamayakanuna, and becoming her domestic servant.

Through the prism of this engaging post-colonial role reversal, and spiced with George's lessons on Shakespeare, John Eppel draws down the curtain on one particular white man in Africa.

But before it's time to go, George will delight us with the antics of his literature classes; his various arrests - all timed to coincide with the police chief's need for help with essays on Hamlet and A Gram of Wheat; his keen eye for flora and fauna; and the long trek back through the hundred years of his family's Zimbabwean past, as he returns an abandoned child to her home.

The two Zimbabwean writers featured in this collection of stories and poems could not be more different. John Eppel is an English literature teacher in Bulawayo; Julius Chingono, from Norton, near Harare, was a rockblaster in mines for many years. Eppel is a deliberate stylist, while Chingono is a deliberate antistylist. The western literary tradition is pervasive in Eppel's writing; Chingono is his own tradition. In another sense, however, they could not be more similar. Both share an aversion for those in power who exploit it to the detriment of all but their cronies and themselves; both feel a deep compassion for the poor and the marginalized of Zimbabwe. And they are both very funny.

It is New Year in Bulawayo, and anybody who is anybody is out celebrating. Hatchings, with an introduction by Khombe Mangwanda, was chosen by Professor Anthony Chennells in the Times Literary Supplement as his choice for the most significant book to have come out of Africa. "The story is simple. In a sentence it can be described as a love story centered on a young couple who discover the true power of love amid the social, economic and moral decay that threatens to swallow their love and everything else. But to say Hatchings is merely a love story would be criminal. It is more than that. Hatchings is a story about Bulawayo, about Zimbabwe, about corruption and cultural decay. In Hatchings John Eppel spares no one. With his sharp and yet witty pen he exposes corruption and pokes fun at those that are abusing power and this means literally everyone. Rich, poor, white, black, Indian, foreigner or local." - Raisedon Baya, Sunday News, Zimbabwe

Two of Zimbabwe's finest poets collide in this masterpiece exploring themes as vast as the style. To sub-cultures, two generations, one collection: Hewn From Rock.

'When George J. George mistook his white Ford Escort for the moon, he knew his time was up.' When Mr George loses his job teaching English at a private secondary school in Bulawayo, 'his pension payout, after forty years of full-time service, bought him two jam doughnuts and a soft tomato.' When he backs his uninsured white Ford Escort into a brand new Mercedes Benz, the out-of-court settlement sees him giving up his house to the complainant, Beauticious Nyamayakanuna, and becoming her domestic servant. Through the prism of this engaging post-colonial role reversal, and spiced with George's lessons on Shakespeare, John Eppel draws down the curtain on one particular white man in Africa. But before it's time to go, George will delight us with the antics of his literature classes; his various arrests - all timed to coincide with the police chief's need for help with essays on Hamlet and A Grain of Wheat; his keen eye for flora and fauna; and the long trek back through the hundred years of his family's Zimbabwean past, as he returns an abandoned child to her home. Eppel has satirized the racial politics of southern Africa in many of his previous novels. In Absent: The English Teacher he turns his gaze inwards for a generous and richly rewarding parody of the land of his birth.

'If the form of my poetry is thoroughly European, its content is thoroughly African.' Thus the author introduces this collection of some eighty of his poems written between the late 1950s and the present: from the settler period through the civil war, to independence and neo- colonialism. The poems explore the contradictions and creative possibilities of an identity that is at once native and white, European and African. The voice is varyingly satirical, confessional, outraged and affectionate.