Simon Van Booy & The Strand Present: Chido Muchemwa

Join us for a new, début author series hosted by Simon Van Booy, featuring Chido Muchemwa, whose first book of short stories, Who Will Bury You? is out this fall with House of Anansi Press. This event will be hosted in the Strand Book Store's 3rd floor Rare Book Room at 828 Broadway on 12th Street.

This event features a reading, Q&A, and book signing.

Can’t make the event?

ACCESSIBILITY:

Strand Book Store is an ADA compliant venue. The event space is accessible via elevator.

ASL interpretation is available for this event by request only. Please reach out to our events team at [email protected] by November 4 to request.

Please ask a Strand employee upon arrival for directions to accessible seating if preferred.

For further information on accessibility in this space, or to make a request, please contact [email protected]

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Intimate stories about Zimbabweans in moments of transition that force them to decide who they really are and choose the people they call their own.

Set in Toronto and Zimbabwe, the twelve elegant stories in Who Will Bury You? touch on themes of loss, identity, and inequality as they follow the lives of Zimbabweans who often feel like they are on the outside looking in. A mother and daughter navigate new relationship dynamics when the daughter comes out as a lesbian. Two sisters wonder what will hold them together after their grandmother’s death. A daughter tries to tell her father she loves him as she prepares to leave home for the first time. A journalist takes her grieving mother on a trip to report on girls who are allegedly being abducted by mermaids. A girl born to be the river god’s wife becomes a hero when chaos breaks out in the mighty Zambezi. A group of mothers discover just how far they are willing to go to protect their children during wartime.

Ephemeral yet beautifully satisfying, the stories in Chido Muchemwa's debut collection ask what makes people leave home, what makes them come back, and what keeps them there.

Chido Muchemwa is a Zimbabwean writer living in Toronto. Her work has appeared in Lolwe, Augur, Catapult, Baltimore Review, and PRISM international, among others. She has been shortlisted twice for the Short Story Day Africa Prize, and she was the winner of the 2022 Bridge Prize.

Simon Van Booy is the award-winning, bestselling author of more than a dozen books for adults and children, most recently The Presence of Absence, Night Came with Many Stars and Sipsworth. He is the editor of three volumes of philosophy and has written for the Times, Financial Times, Guardian, Telegraph, Washington Post, and BBC. His novels and short stories have been translated into many languages. Raised in rural North Wales, Simon currently lives between London and New York, where he is also a book editor and a volunteer EMT for Central Park Medical Unit and RVAC. In early 2020, he rescued his first mouse.

Host or Publisher The Strand Book Store