Second paragraph of third chapter:

And, sure enough, when the rescue team pulled the car out of the Dula, all the passengers in it — a bull, a goat and a rooster — were indeed found dead, the bodies still strapped to their seats. But there was no sign whatsoever of the vice president. While the rescuers painstakingly searched for him, those who really know about things ventured to declare it a waste of time; the horse had most probably been saved by his talismans and escaped. They weren’t, in fact, too, too far from the truth. By the time the car landed at the bottom of the Dula, Tuvy’s hooves were busy eating the road, tholukuthi bearing the vice president to the safety of his sorcerer’s homestead.

One of the Clarke Award submissions from last year that was clearly fantasy rather than science fiction, but which I found interesting enough to come back to. It’s a parable of politics in a post-colonial African country with a strong resemblance to the author’s native Zimbabwe, but with the difference that all of the characters are animals; the old president and his successor are horses, the central character is a politically aware goat, and we have dogs, hens, cows, everything.

Obviously the root is Animal Farm, but it’s a bit less heavy-handed and the plot is more complex; also the language is effervescent, with the word “tholukuthi ” frequently interjected – it means something like “you find that…” in Ndebele, but seems to be used here to mean something more like “that is to say” or the German “beziehungsweise”; also “Tholokuthi Hey” was a massive hit song at the time of the 2017 revolution in Zimbabwe, which is part of what the book is about.

So, quite a lot of fun. Also shortlisted for the Booker Prize that year, and for a couple of other awards, so I don’t feel too bad that we overlooked it for the Clarke. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book by a non-white author. Next on that pile is The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories, edited by Yu Chen and Regina Kanyu Wang.