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Ways of Dying
Contributor(s): Mda, Zakes (Author)
ISBN: 0312420919     ISBN-13: 9780312420918
Publisher: Picador USA
OUR PRICE:   $18.00  
Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats
Published: August 2002
Qty:
Annotation: "Ways of Dying, " one of the first novels to be published after South Africa's black majority won democratic rule in 1994, is already recognized as a comic, touching, and profound novel of love and strife about Toloki, a "professional mourner" in a vast and violent city of the new South Africa.
Additional Information
BISAC Categories:
- Fiction | Literary
Dewey: FIC
LCCN: 2002066772
Physical Information: 0.9" H x 5.4" W x 8.2" (0.45 lbs) 224 pages
Themes:
- Cultural Region - African
 
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc.
Publisher Description:

Winner of the M-Net Book Prize
Shortlisted for the CNA and Noma Awards

In Ways of Dying, Zakes Mda's acclaimed first novel, Toloki is a professional mourner in a vast and violent city of the new South Africa. Day after day he attends funerals in the townships, dressed with dignity in a threadbare suit, cape, and battered top hat, to comfort the grieving families of the victims of the city's crime, racial hatred, and crippling poverty. At a Christmas day funeral for a young boy Toloki is reunited with Noria, a woman from his village. Together they help each other to heal the past, and as their story interweaves with those of their acquaintances this elegant short novel provides a magical and painful picture of South Africa today.

Ways of Dying was awarded South Africa's prestigious M-Net Book Prize, awarded by the TV channel M-Net to books written in one of South Africa's official languages, and was shortlisted for the Central News Agency (CNA) Award and the Noma Award, an Africa-wide prize founded by Shoichi Noma, onetime president of Kodansha International.

Contributor Bio(s): Mda, Zakes: - Zakes Mda is a professor of creative writing at Ohio University. He has been a visiting professor at both Yale and the University of Vermont. Among his novels, The Heart of Redness (FSG, 2002) won the Richard Wright Zora Neale Hurston Legacy Award. He lives in Johannesburg, South Africa, and Athens, Ohio.