... remarkable ... Zamani, however, is too rich and complicated a character to be reduced to any single metaphor or symbol ... Tshuma’s brilliant layering of competing images and metaphors is one of the many marvels of this wise and demanding novel. While Zamani may claim, over and over, that what he’s seeking is a full accounting of history at the most intimate level, the stories that are slowly and painfully revealed suggest that something far more complicated is at work ... stunning ... It’s a remarkable feat. Through Zamani, Tshuma shows us how much work it takes to efface the past, and, through House of Stone, she proves that those efforts are no match for a novel as ambitious and ingenious as this one.

This Zimbabwean debut is not an easy book to describe. To call it clever or ambitious is to do it a disservice – it is both, but also more than that. It is definitely not faultless, but it is large enough and unusual enough to shrug off its defects and still leave the reader impressed ... not a book for the faint-hearted ... There are no heroes here, only people forced by circumstances to perform the most unspeakable acts to survive ... Sometimes the book is too dizzying: as soon as we have accepted one revelation we are blindsided by another ... Tshuma is incapable of writing a boring sentence: she inhabits her narration so totally that even the most absurd and silly actions become believable. The wordplay and absurdist plot lines act as comic relief, but the author never lets us forget the serious stuff even for a minute, and it is this balance that makes the book work. By the end she has managed to not only sum up Zimbabwean history, but also all of African colonial history: from devastating colonialism to the bitter wars of independence to the euphoria of self-rule and the disillusionment of the present. It is an extraordinary achievement for a first novel.

... devastating and inviting ... [Tshuma’s] book slips like sand through fingers through time and voice, masterfully condensing the history of Zimbabwe to the point where the back story is informative and provocative but not cumbersome ... [Tshuma’s] is a novel without a wasted sentence, radiant with its descriptions of people and spaces and moments.

Riveting ... Though it starts off a little slow, House of Stone quickly reaches an engaging tempo to tell an important, complex story ... The eloquent narrator, Zamani, provides tangible details and stories that come together to paint a picture of a vibrant, struggling country. Tshuma completely inhabits her obsessive narrator’s voice, allowing for total immersion. Her prose flows easily. It is simultaneously realistic and literary, pulling you into a family as it falls apart ... The careful opening plunges deeply into Zimbabwean culture and life before the story picks up, transforming into a powerful meditation on identity, politics, and what makes a nation.

A work of remarkable imagination, House of Stone is quickly and evenly paced until it begins coursing toward the denouement, flinging jaw-dropping twists amidst the factional, fractional, bloody birth of Zimbabwe, with mordant wit and keen characterization ... The cadences of Tshuma’s prose are most assertive when she’s toing and froing in time, often from one paragraph to the next, the singsong give-and-take ... Tshuma presents us with a history lesson in the form of these individual lives, demonstrating the folly of denying that the personal is political.

Zamani’s opaque motivations distance the reader from the narrative, and sometimes the plot struggles under the weight of its hefty ambitions. But Tshuma ultimately delivers nuance and eloquent character studies, proving that an ugly history leaves no soul unscarred in its wake.

Harrowing ... an unflinching portrait of life in Zimbabwe before, during, and immediately after the Rhodesian Bush War ... delves into these atrocities and others, and that history at times overwhelms the motivations and interiority of the central characters. Nonetheless, Tshuma delineates a rich and complicated tale about the importance of history the price of revolution, the pursuit of freedom, and the remaking of one’s self ... A multilayered, twisting, and surprising whirlwind of a novel that is as impressive as it is heartbreaking.

Darkly humorous ... Though the tangents are sometimes overlong, Tshuma’s novel bounces through time and bursts with an epic’s worth of narratives. This is a clever, entertaining novel.