The Ones We Loved: A Novel

"A haunting, unforgettable story about a shattered girl and a shattered boy rebuilding their lives on the thinnest reeds of hope." — Lawrence Hill

 “If Toni Morrison is a language, Tarisai Ngangura speaks it as well as any novelist writing today. . . .A magnificent novel.” — Donna Bailey Nurse 

A love story of two young people who must surrender to heartache before claiming the peace they seek, from a debut author of unusual power and grace

On a bus moving across a rural landscape, from town to dusty town, two young people are escaping with their lives. She has committed a crime for which there will be retribution. He is staggering from a devastating discovery. These two will find each other and attempt a new way forward, with nothing to hold on to except hope. But the talons of the past have dug deep, and the wounds have not yet healed.

Seamlessly transitioning between past lives and present realities, The Ones We Loved tenderly weaves both myth and memory into an account of two people desperate for connection and yearning for a place to belong.

Told in the rhythms of oral retellings practiced by Zimbabwe’s Shona ethnic group, where the soundscape of a ngano (story)—its melodies, pauses, lifts and stops—creates a call-and-response with the audience, The Ones We Loved is about the homes we leave behind, the lonely voices that find us and the painful consequences of experiencing a love that has never known how to let go.

“If Toni Morrison is a language, Tarisai Ngangura speaks it as well as any novelist writing today: The jazz shaped sentences inside fragmented, narrative solos, yearning towards a communal, historical whole. Ngangura’s ordinary people claim our hearts with their commitment to living and loving notwithstanding an atmosphere of vicious oppression. Yet, the reader remains excruciatingly conscious of the private stories of brutalized loved ones her characters are loathe to share. In a magnificent novel, that seethes with beauty, passion and rage, Ngangura contemplates how to embrace a history composed of love and devastating pain.” - Donna Bailey Nurse

"The Ones We Loved is a literary cat burglar. Steals your breath. Makes off with your time before you see it gone. Pockets your heart and hands it back—rewired. Tarisai Ngangura has penned a haunting, unforgettable story about a shattered girl and a shattered boy rebuilding their lives on the thinnest reeds of hope."  - Lawrence Hill, author of The Book of Negroes