A National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree
NBCC John Leonard First Book Prize Finalist
Aspen Words Literary Prize Finalist
Named a Best Book of the Year by Vogue, NPR, Elle, Esquire, Buzzfeed, San Francisco Chronicle, Cosmopolitan, The Huffington Post, The A.V. Club, The Root, Harperâs Bazaar, Paste, Bustle, Kirkus Reviews, Electric Literature, LitHub, New York Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Bust
âThe debut novel of the year.â âVogue
âLike so many stories of the black diaspora, What We Lose is an examination of haunting.â âDoreen St. FÊlix, The New Yorker
âRaw and ravishing, this novel pulses with vulnerability and shimmering anger.â âNicole Dennis-Benn, O, the Oprah Magazine
âStunning. . . . Powerfully moving and beautifully wrought, What We Lose reflects on family, love, loss, race, womanhood, and the places we feel home.â âBuzzfeed
âRemember this name: Zinzi Clemmons. Long may she thrill us with exquisite works like What We Lose. . . . The book is a remarkable journey.â âEssence
From an author of rare, haunting power, a stunning novel about a young African-American woman coming of ageâa deeply felt meditation on race, sex, family, and country
Raised in Pennsylvania, Thandi views the world of her motherâs 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 anchorâsomeone, or something, to love.
In arresting and unsettling prose, we watch Thandiâs 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 womanâs understanding of absence and identity that spans continents and decades, What We Lose heralds the arrival of a virtuosic new voice in fiction.