Long may she thrill us with exquisite works like What We Lose. Powerfully moving and beautifully wrought, What We Lose reflects on family, love, loss, race, womanhood, and the places we feel home.” - Buzzfeed “Raw and ravishing, this novel pulses with vulnerability and shimmering anger.” -Nicole Dennis-Benn, O, the Oprah Magazine “Like so many stories of the black diaspora, What We Lose is an examination of haunting.” -Doreen St. Club, The Root, Harper’s Bazaar, Paste, Bustle, Kirkus Reviews, Electric Literature, LitHub, New York Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Bust Named a Best Book of the Year by Vogue, NPR, Elle, Esquire, Buzzfeed, San Francisco Chronicle, Cosmopolitan, The Huffington Post, The A.V. NBCC John Leonard First Book Prize Finalist An elegiac distillation, at once intellectual and visceral, of a young woman’s understanding of absence and identity that spans continents and decades, What We Lose heralds the arrival of a virtuosic new voice in fiction.A National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree Through exquisite and emotional vignettes, Clemmons creates a stunning portrayal of what it means to choose to live, after loss. In arresting and unsettling prose, we watch Thandi’s life unfold, from losing her mother and learning to live without the person who has most profoundly shaped her existence, to her own encounters with romance and unexpected motherhood. She tries to connect these dislocated pieces of her life, and as her mother succumbs to cancer, Thandi searches for an anchor-someone, or something, to love. She is an outsider wherever she goes, caught between being black and white, American and not. Raised in Pennsylvania, Thandi views the world of her mother’s childhood in Johannesburg as both impossibly distant and ever present. The book is a remarkable journey.” -Essenceįrom an author of rare, haunting power, a stunning novel about a young African-American woman coming of age-a deeply felt meditation on race, sex, family, and country

A National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree

What we lose zinzi