The house of hunger

Marechera made an immediate impact with the publication of The House of Hunger. The novella and nine short stories, most of them set in Zimbabwe, symbolise both home and country as the 'house of hunger', the place of madness and violence and despair. Marechera describes a world in which tenderness has long given way to the tactics of survival, and he does so in a style at once explosive and loaded with angry humour.