Butterfly Burning

Butterfly Burning brings the brilliantly poetic voice of Zimbabwean writer Yvonne Vera to American readers for the first time. Set in Makokoba, a black township, in the late 1940s, the novel is an intensely bittersweet love story. When Fumbatha, a construction worker, meets the much younger Phephelaphi, he "wants her like the land beneath his feet from which birth had severed him". He in turn fills her "with hope larger than memory". But Phephelaphi is not satisfied with their "one-room" love alone. The qualities that drew Fumbatha to her - her sense of independence and freedom - end up separating them. And the closely woven fabric of township life, where everyone knows everyone else, has a mesh too tight and too intricate to allow her to escape her circumstances on her own.