Critics' Opinion:
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Published Jul 2017
224 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
From an author of rare, haunting power, a stunning novel about a young African-American woman coming of age - a deeply felt meditation on race, sex, family, and country
Raised in Pennsylvania, Thandi views the world of her mother's childhood in Johannesburg as both impossibly distant and ever present. She is an outsider wherever she goes, caught between being black and white, American and not. She tries to connect these dislocated pieces of her life, and as her mother succumbs to cancer, Thandi searches for an anchor - someone, or something, to love.
In arresting and unsettling prose, we watch Thandi's life unfold, from losing her mother and learning to live without the person who has most profoundly shaped her existence, to her own encounters with romance and unexpected motherhood. Through exquisite and emotional vignettes, Clemmons creates a stunning portrayal of what it means to choose to live, after loss. An elegiac distillation, at once intellectual and visceral, of a young woman's understanding of absence and identity that spans continents and decades, What We Lose heralds the arrival of a virtuosic new voice in fiction.
"Starred Review. A compelling exploration of race, migration, and womanhood in contemporary America." - Kirkus
"Exacting reflections on race, mourning, and family. ... Clemmons admirably balances the story's myriad complicated themes." - Publishers Weekly
"Stunning. ... Powerfully moving and beautifully wrought, What We Lose reflects on family, love, loss, race, womanhood, and the places we feel home." - Buzzfeed
"Clemmons' debut novel is a stunning work about growing up, losing your parents, and being an outsider. Perfect for fans of tangled immigrant stories like Americanah." - Glamour.com
"Zinzi Clemmons' powerful debut novel tells the story of Thandi, a woman raised in Philadelphia who's struggling to come to terms with the death of her mother, who left behind a complicated legacy of her own." - Cosmopolitan.com
"Zinzi Clemmons's debut novel signals the emergence of a voice that refuses to be ignored." - Paul Beatty, Booker-winning author of The Sellout
"An intimate narrative that often makes another life as believable as your own." - John Edgar Wideman, author of Writing to Save a Life
"Clemmons's prose is rhythmically exact and acutely moving. No experience is left unexamined or unimagined." - Margo Jefferson, author of Negroland
"Zinzi Clemmons' first book heralds the work of a new writer with a true and lasting voice - one that is just right for our complicated millennium. Bright and filled with shadows, humor, and trenchant insights into what it means to have a heart divided by different cultures, What We Lose is a win, just right for the ages." - Hilton Als, author of White Girls
"I love how Zinzi Clemmons complicates identity in What We Lose. Her main character is both South African and American, privileged and outsider, driven by desire and gutted by grief. This is a piercingly beautiful first novel." - Danzy Senna, author of New People
" What We Lose immerses us in a world of complex ideas and issues with ease. Clemmons imbues each aspect of this novel with clear, nuanced thinking and emotional heft. Part meditation on loss, part examination of identity as it relates to ethnicity, nationality, gender and class, and part intimate look at one woman's coming of age, What We Lose announces a talented new voice in fiction." - Angela Flournoy, author of The Turner House
This information about What We Lose was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Zinzi Clemmons was raised in Philadelphia by a South African mother and an American father. A graduate of Brown and Columbia, her writing has appeared in Zoetrope: All-Story, The Paris Review Daily, Transition, and elsewhere. She is a cofounder and former publisher of Apogee Journal and a contributing editor to Literary Hub. She has been in residence at the MacDowell Colony, Bread Loaf, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and Dar al-Ma'mûn in Marrakech, Morocco. Clemmons lives in Los Angeles with her husband, where she teaches at The Colburn Conservatory and Occidental College.
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