A National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree
NBCC John Leonard First Book Prize Finalist
Aspen Words Literary Prize Finalist
Named a Best Book of the Year by Vogue, NPR,ย Elle, Esquire, Buzzfeed,ย San Francisco Chronicle,ย Cosmopolitan, The Huffington Post,ย The A.V. Club, The Root,ย Harperโs Bazaar,ย Paste,ย Bustle,ย Kirkus Reviews,ย Electric Literature, LitHub, New York Post, Los Angeles Review of Books,ย andย Bust
โThe debut novel of the year.โ โVogue
โLike so many stories of the black diaspora, What We Lose is an examination of haunting.โ โDoreen St. Fรฉlix, The New Yorker
โRaw and ravishing, this novel pulses with vulnerability and shimmering anger.โ โNicole Dennis-Benn,ย O, the Oprah Magazine
โStunning. . . . Powerfully moving and beautifully wrought, What We Lose reflects on family, love, loss, race, womanhood, and the places we feel home.โ โBuzzfeed
โRemember this name: Zinzi Clemmons. Long may she thrill us with exquisite works like What We Lose. . . . The book is a remarkable journey.โ โEssence
From an author of rare, haunting power, a stunning novel about a young African-American woman coming of ageโa deeply felt meditation on race, sex, family, and country
Raised in Pennsylvania, Thandi views the world of her motherโs childhood in Johannesburg as both impossibly distant and ever present. She is an outsider wherever she goes, caught between being black and white, American and not. She tries to connect these dislocated pieces of her life, and as her mother succumbs to cancer, Thandi searches for an anchorโsomeone, or something, to love.
In arresting and unsettling prose, we watch Thandiโs 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. Through exquisite and emotional vignettes, Clemmons creates a stunning portrayal of what it means to choose to live, after loss. An elegiac distillation, at once intellectual and visceral, of a young womanโs understanding of absence and identity that spans continents and decades,ย What We Loseย heralds the arrival of a virtuosic new voice in fiction.