This intense and unusual novel traces the personal crisis of Ch’anzu (zie/hir, gender neutral pronouns which can be used regardless of gender identity) after zie loses both hir wife and job on one day. ‘Swaddled in confusion,’ Ch’anzu flees hir personal disaster by taking a job in a compound of African refugees located in Wagga Wagga. Though Ch’anzu is also Afrocentric, zie is not welcome: ‘In Serengotti, the world is small and hearts are big, but they shrink against strangers and outcasts.’

Ch’anzu’s task is to use hir coding skills to design a ‘community health app’. Ch’anzu throws hirself into creating a ‘choose your own adventure’ game when zie recognises the power of story in Serengotti: this is a place where terrible pasts forever threaten to write terrible futures, as exemplified by a girl muted by the horrors of war and a boy soldier who, having finally found safety, can only make ‘his own circle of violence’.

Serengotti is ultimately driven by Ch’anzu’s search for meaning and intimacy in an unpredictable world where human passions see bodies pile up both within and without Serengotti. The novel’s bold use of the second person, present tense fuels narrative tension by powerfully evoking Ch’anzu’s almost manic, playful and often poetic mindscape. The troubling intimacy zie shares with hir twin, Tex, the warped dynamics of hir broken marriage, and the genuine maternal love of hir aunt, make Ch’anzu realise that hir own compulsion to nurture is dangerous in a world full of people without ‘soni’ (shame).

Serengotti is a striking and original novel that explores how loves of all kinds can give life – or take it away.

Reviewed by Helen Gildfind

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Eugen M. Bacon, MA, MSc, PhD, is an African Australian author of several novels and fiction collections. She’s a twice World Fantasy Award finalist, a British Fantasy Award finalist, a Foreword Book of the Year silver award winner, and was announced in the honor list of the 2022 Otherwise Fellowships for ‘doing exciting work in gender and speculative fiction’.

Danged Black Thing by Transit Lounge Publishing was a finalist in the BSFA, Foreword, Aurealis and Australian Shadows Awards, and made the Otherwise Award Honor List as a ‘sharp collection of Afro-Surrealist work’. Eugen’s creative work has appeared worldwide, including in Award Winning Australian Writing, Fantasy Magazine, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction.

Visit Eugen Bacon’s website