RaveThe Post and Courier (CAN)\"Steinberg’s prose is understated, clear and objective, occasionally even informal, further enhancing the sense of listening in on a story. And he writes, too, with a novelist’s flair for pacing, scene-painting and dialog, as well as a cinematographer’s ability for cross-cutting. Each chapter of this thoroughly engrossing book advances the plot — the individual stories illustrating the human frailty of two of the most compelling figures in recent South African history, and the collective history of that country. A country that Nelson Mandela, like Aeneas, was seemingly destined to lead but at a devastating personal price. Whether you feel you already know about Winnie and Nelson Mandela or not, this book will more than reward you.\
Noviolet Bulawayo
RaveThe Post and CourierNoViolet Bulawayo’s brilliant debut novel, We Need New Names, was suffused with the nostalgia of the emigrant. Her equally impressive second novel is saturated with the anger of the exile ... Indeed, while most of the absurdity and surrealism hints at the irrepressible wit and resilience of Zimbabweans and allows the reader to revel in Bulawayo’s imaginative brio, some of the brutality and violence of post-independence Zimbabwe causes the fable-mode to falter ... writing in beast-fable mode taps into the deep roots of African story-telling and allows Bulawayo to \'channel\' the oral tradition of her grandmother’s \'beguiling tales of talking animals and alternate worlds.\' Numerous stylistic devices lend an almost incantatory drive to the narrative.
Megha Majumdar
PositiveThe Post and CourierA Burning jumps off the page with the pace of a thriller screenplay and the technicolor vividness of a comic book ... [Heinrich] Boll’s novel [The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum] had a clearly political purpose in 1974, and came with a subtitle that made the book sound like a work of nonfiction. For all the implausibility of some of its plot details, A Burning comes across with the same kind of prophetic, political urgency as a warning against exactly the same process: \'how violence develops and where it can lead.
