Zoo City
Winner of the Arthur C Clarke Award.
Zinzi has a Sloth on her back, a dirty 419 scam habit and a talent for finding lost things. But when a little old lady turns up dead and the cops confiscate her last paycheck, she’s forced to take on her least favourite kind of job – missing persons.
Being hired by reclusive music producer Odi Huron to find a teenybop pop star should be her ticket out of Zoo City, the festering slum where the criminal underclass and their animal companions live in the shadow of hell’s undertow.
Instead, it catapults Zinzi deeper into the maw of a city twisted by crime and magic, where she’ll be forced to confront the dark secrets of former lives – including her own.
Book Trailer
REVIEWS
“Lauren Beukes is very *very* good” – William Gibson
“Lauren Beukes is Jeff Noon crossed with Raymond Chandler. I loved it, it’s going to be huge.” – Paul Cornell
“I couldn’t put this down. It’s weird, thrilling, funny… filled with sleazy characters and lots of bad attitude.”– Mike Nicol
“This is intelligent and witty urban writing for the 21st century: unashamedly South African yet thoroughly metropolitan; wildly entertaining, yet richly nuanced… Zoo City reaffirms Beukes as one of South Africa’s most imaginative new literary voices.” – Andreas Spath, Women24
An unfamiliar land full of familiars, a broken Johannesburg peopled with damaged wonders… If our words are bullets, Lauren Beukes is a marksman in a world of drunken machine-gunners.” – Bill Willingham