“Where The Heart Is offers a nuanced view of one family’s struggle to negotiate cold Britannia as they face dicey neighbourhoods, sketchy liaisons, and perennial ill-fate. Chatora’s diaspora is not the glorified El Dorado; it is an honest place of grit and survival. A stellar contribution.”
– Tariro Ndoro, Author Agringada: Like a Gringa, Like a Foreigner
For migrant Fari Mupawaenda, life cannot be complete without quitting the back breaking struggle for survival in the UK and returning to the laid-back streets of a warm Harare… but does it make sense for him to want to return to the periphery once more? The man who returns, why does he return? To what does he return?
His wife, a zealous cosmopolitan, the daughter, a conflicted bed-hopping undergraduate, and the son, a budding homosexual, will not follow Fari in his trip to what they see as the back of beyond. They have decided to invest fully where they are.
Fari’s reverse trip is a story about the human body, a tight memory test and a duel between geography and anticipation…
Masterful in style and form, the narratives in Andrew Chatora’s Where the Heart Is are intensely provocative.
Andrew Chatora writes novels and short stories and hails from Zimbabwe. He received an MA in Media, Culture and Communication from UCL. His writing explores multifarious themes of belonging, identity politics, citizenship, and nationhood issues. Where the Heart Is, is his second novel following his highly successful debut novella: Diaspora Dreams. Andrew is principally interested in the global politics of inequality which he interrogates through his writing. When he is not writing, he is working on his PhD thesis on digital piracy, with Birmingham City University’s School of Media and English.
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