Verdict: stick
What do you do when a genre is too broad to accurately categorize a book? You come up with an easy to handle sub-genre – see holocaust literature, apartheid literature, and 9/11 literature among others. So, to call this book tyrant literature would be tempting, but the paucity of active tyrants (thank heavens) means the future of this sub-genre may be a little limited. This book does contain a tyrant, but is more about Zimbabwe the country, and thankfully the corpus on this embattled African country is growing with the arrival of some new voices, such as Petina Gappah and Brian Chikwava.
Add to that list Irene Sabatini with her debut novel The Boy Next Door. This is the story of Lindiwe Bishop, a young black girl in newly-independent Zimbabwe who falls in love with Ian McKenzie, her white neighbour, an otherwise unremarkable adolescent, except he has been convicted of murder. Their love story, stretched over almost two decades, forms the main filament of the novel. In the background, Zimbabwe is falling apart socially and economically. The book contains no small commentary on Mugabe and his cronyism that brings this once prosperous country to the point of near collapse.
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