Rotten Row

It is just after nine o'clock in the morning. Gidza will die in exactly forty-three minutes and thirteen seconds.'Rotten Row' is the Criminal Division of Harare, and the courts and the unfortunates who pass through them are the subjects of this mesmerising collection of stories. In these portraits of lives aching for meaning and redemption, Petina Gappah crosses the barriers of class, race, gender and sexual politics in contemporary Zimbabwe, to explore the causes and effects of crime and the nature of justice.

Petina Gappah is a Zimbabwean writer with law degrees from Cambridge, Graz University and the University of Zimbabwe. Her debut collection, An Elegy for Easterly, won the Guardian First Book Award in 2009. Her debut novel, The Book of Memory, was published in 2015.