A habitual flick-reader, I have learned the pleasures of rereading, savoring over and over again sentences I might once have skimmed.[19] I found echoes of Zimbabwe’s shortages in British novelist Helen Dunmore’s The Siege, an imaginative reconstruction of the blockade of Leningrad in 1941.[20] I recognized protagonist[21] Anna’s joy when she unexpectedly found an onion for her starving family: While we were never that hungry, I, too, had felt a sudden surge of elation when fruit disappeared from the shops but a neighbor invited us to pick mulberries from her tree.[22]
When flour was hard to find, I was soothed by Miriam’s Kitchen, Elizabeth Ehrlich’s account of her attempts to integrate her Jewish heritage into daily life. Ms. Ehrlich’s meticulous recording of the way to make her Polish mother-in-law’s apple cake reminded me that hardships teach us to cherish simple things.[23]
But here on a road in Marange, a policeman was waiting. I looked at the three books on my dashboard. Each one was precious to me: Each had a story. Naomi Alderman’s prize-winning novel Disobedience I had snapped up with glee when I saw it at a Harare flea market a few days earlier.[24] I bought The Vintage Book of Cats soon after we acquired our first cat in 2002. As the tribe expanded, I enjoyed reading extracts from this anthology of cat literature to my husband by candlelight (frequent power cuts have taught us you need a minimum of four candles to read by).[25] My son’s former teacher gave us The Fox Gate, a wonderful collection of stories by children’s author William Mayne. Sam and I had just read the tale of a mouse who found his way to its destination.
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