“The Digging Stars is a star cluster known by many names. It is most commonly called the Pleiades. Depending on who and where you are, it’s also referred to as the Seven Sisters or isiLimela, among other things. But no matter its name, in Novuyo Rosa Tshuma’s excellent new novel, “Digging Stars,” the cluster is a force, a symbol, a family heirloom. The story opens with a daughter, Athandwa, and a father, Frank, reuniting for the first time in years in New York City. Athandwa and her family are from Zimbabwe, but when she was a child, Frank, who was inspired by the Digging Stars, moved to the United States, at first temporarily to study astrophysics at a Midwestern research school referred to only as the Program, and then permanently to pursue a career as an astronomer. Now 11 years old, Athandwa is visiting New York to see her father and his new life, which, she didn’t realize, includes a new family composed of a girlfriend, Candice, and Candice’s son, Péralte. The plan is that she will stay four weeks and then, when she is 12, Frank will bring her to live with him in New York for good. When he returns to Zimbabwe a year later to pick her up, however, Frank dies in a mysterious car crash that gets called an accident, though some speculate there is more to the story. The grief surrounding this cataclysmic death accompanies Athandwa for the next decade and eventually propels her to move to America to attend the Program herself and make her father proud.”

New York Times, Weike Wang, 28 September 2023

Title: Digging Stars

Publisher: Norton WW & Company Inc

ISBN: 978-1324035176

Novuyo Rose Tshuma made her debut into the writing scene in 2013 with her novella, “Shadows” comprising of 5 short stories published by Kwela. It won the Herman Charles Bosman prize (2014). This was followed by the House of Stone (2018) which won the Edward Stanford Prize in 2019 for fiction with a sense of place. Digging Stars is her second novel. In between she has written short stories: A Lesson in Englishness (2019) and Telepresence (2019) Novuyo has received critical acclaim and awards for many of her short stories which have been published in various anthologies.

Novuyo Rosa Tshuma is an Assistant Professor at Emerson College in Boston, where she serves on the Writing, Literature and Publishing Faculty. She holds a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She grew up in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe before relocating to South Africa where she pursued her tertiary education at the University of Witswatersrand. While she studied Economics she wrote her way into the Iowa Writer’s Workshop which enabled her to pursue her passion for creative writing.

#ZimbabweLitMonth is curated by novelist Sue Nyathi. She is a published Zimbabwean author of four fiction titles: The Polygamist (2012), The Gold Diggers (2018), A Family Affair (2020), and An Angel’s Demise (2022). She also edited a nonfiction anthology titled When Secrets Become Stories, Women Speak Out (2021). You can visit her website here and follow her on Twitter at @SueNyathi.