Glory /// NoViolet Bulawayo

2022 BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST

“Manifoldly clever…brilliant… ‘Glory’ is its own vivid world, drawn from its own folklore. This is a satire with sharper teeth, angrier, and also very, very funny.” —Violet Kupersmith, The New York Times Book Review

“Genius.”—#1 New York Times bestselling author Jason Reynolds

From the award-winning author of the Booker-prize finalist We Need New Names, an exhilarating novel about the fall of an oppressive regime, and the chaos and opportunity that rise in its wake.

NoViolet Bulawayo’s bold new novel follows the fall of the Old Horse, the long-serving leader of a fictional country, and the drama that follows for a rumbustious nation of animals on the path to true liberation. Inspired by the unexpected fall by coup in November 2017 of Robert G. Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s president of nearly four decades, Glory shows a country’s imploding, narrated by a chorus of animal voices that unveil the ruthlessness required to uphold the illusion of absolute power and the imagination and bulletproof optimism to overthrow it completely. By immersing readers in the daily lives of a population in upheaval, Bulawayo reveals the dazzling life force and irresistible wit that lie barely concealed beneath the surface of seemingly bleak circumstances.

And at the center of this tumult is Destiny, a young goat who returns to Jidada to bear witness to revolution—and to recount the unofficial history and the potential legacy of the females who have quietly pulled the strings here. The animal kingdom—its connection to our primal responses and its resonance in the mythology, folktales, and fairy tales that define cultures the world over—unmasks the surreality of contemporary global politics to help us understand our world more clearly, even as Bulawayo plucks us right out of it.

Although Zimbabwe is the immediate inspiration for this thrilling story, Glory was written in a time of global clamor, with resistance movements across the world challenging different forms of oppression. Thus it often feels like Bulawayo captures several places in one blockbuster allegory, crystallizing a turning point in history with the texture and nuance that only the greatest fiction can.

BIO

NoViolet Bulawayo is the author of We Need New Names, which was a finalist for the Booker Prize and won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for fiction, and the Etisalat Prize for Literature. Bulawayo grew up in Zimbabwe, and now lives in the United States.

REVIEWS

“Manifoldly clever…brilliant… ‘Glory’ is its own vivid world, drawn from its own folklore. This is a satire with sharper teeth, angrier, and also very, very funny.” -- Violet Kupersmith, The New York Times Book Review

“A crackling political satire.” -- The New York Times

“Genius.” -- #1 New York Times bestselling author Jason Reynolds

“Few writers possess a literary voice as inimitable as Bulawayo’s…[The] dazzling voices of this novel will draw you deep into its ambitious and mystifying heart.” -- Vulture

“An absurd yet captivating examination of themes such as toxic masculinity, hero worship, and performative change.” -- TIME

“Bulawayo’s storytelling gifts…are prodigious…Any satire worth its weight in talking animals is really a warning — to the powers that be, the complicit and anyone who thinks nothing so terrible could ever happen to them…By almost any measure, ‘Glory’ weighs a ton.” -- Washington Post

“Bulawayo’s chronicle of the new government’s corruption and the old one’s brutality dramatizes Zimbabwean history while also illuminating the challenges of many developing nations.” -- The New Yorker

[P]  Penguin Books  /  February 28, 2023

1.0" H x 7.9" L x 5.2" W (0.65 lbs) 416 pages