Andrew
Book Review
Edmore Zvinonzwa
BRYONY Rheam’s second novel, “All Comes to Dust”, confirms the Bulawayo-based writer is a rising force.
The book was voted best in the Outstanding Fiction Book category at the 2022 National Arts Merit Awards.
Published by amaBooks, “All Comes to Dust” beat Abraham Makamera’s “Mboni” as well as another Bulawayo product “Sirens: Tales of Youth and Love” by Leroy Mthulisi Ndlovu.
The book grabbed its first gong in November 2021 in the Roil Bulawayo Arts Award for the Outstanding Literary Work (Fiction).
It also made it to the Top 10 Books by African writers in the Publishers Weekly –a weekly news magazine focused on the global book publishing business.
The success of “All Comes to Dust” follows that of the author’s first book “This September Sun” which won the Best First Book at the 2010 Zimbabwe Book Publishers Association Awards.
The book was republished in 2013 by UK Parthians Books and topped the Amazon UK charts as an eBook.
It is currently a set book for the Zimbabwe School Examinations Council Advanced Level Literature.
The central plot of the novel revolves around detective chief inspector Edmund’s probing of the suspicious death of socialite Marcia Pullman.
He is assisted by Craig Martin.
The miserly Marcia is a replica of a real-world person whom the author encountered in the early 2000s.
The book –a long-simmering, intriguing murder mystery –is also an incisive depiction of life in present-day Bulawayo and explores the lives of both black and white Zimbabweans.
The story follows that of “This September Sun” –another murder mystery novel that was beautifully written, portraying the lives of two Zimbabwean women, Ellie and her grandmother.
It shows how, like most young people, Ellie yearns to broaden her horizons and relocates to the United Kingdom. However, she finds that life is not what she hoped it would be, only to return home after the murder of her grandmother.
Bryony was born on September 17, 1974 in Kadoma as the second born in a family of three children. She attended Redcliff Primary, then Chancellor School in Mutare before moving to Waterford and finally Whitestone in Bulawayo. For her secondary education, she went to Girls’ College in the City Of Kings before proceeding to university in the United Kingdom, graduating with a BA and an MA in Literature. She then spent a year lecturing in Singapore, returning to Zimbabwe in 2001. It is then that she started teaching at Girls’ College. She left to work in Ndola, Zambia in 2008 but returned to the City of Kings seven years later to resume teaching at the same institution.
“I have always wanted to be a writer. In 2003, I saw an advert, a publishing house was looking for short story contributions.
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