The Toppling

The Toppling is Cynthia Marangwanda's highly anticipated follow-up to her award-winning novella, Shards. At its heart is Mamoyo, a spirit medium who has always regarded her gift as a curse. But when a ghost from the colonial past begins to haunt her, she is thrust into a perilous journey that forces her to reconsider everything she thought she knew. As Mamoyo battles forces more powerful than she could have imagined, the struggle extends far beyond her own survival, to the very future of her country. Steeped in history and spirituality, The Toppling lays bare the unhealed wounds of a nation in crisis, while weaving a story of resistance, reckoning, and resilience. With her signature artistry and unflinching vision, Marangwanda delivers a gripping narrative that refuses to be put down.

~Lazarus Panashe Nyagwambo, author and editor

"It is folly to think you can challenge a behemoth and come out victorious...or even alive." When MaMoyo wakes from a desperate fever dream, it seems she is simply battling sleep paralysis, but as her story unfolds, straddling Zimbabwe's history and current state, material and spiritual, it becomes clear that MaMoyo is on a quest to save her nation from itself. MaMoyo finally faces down its chief architect and battles this principality for the future of the next generation. The Toppling is a brief, yet weighty narrative that forces a nation to interrogate what it is and how it became that. Marangwanda handles this work with great boldness and authority.

~Tariro Ndoro, author and poet

In Cynthia Marangwanda's The Toppling, just like in her first offering, Shards, a terrible beauty is born... simultaneously horrifying and aesthetically pleasing, evoking a mixture of awe, fear, and admiration. Marangwanda still has the same incredible ability to turn history inside out. On meeting Cecil John Rhodes in an out of body experience, a young woman embarks on a whole quest to right the wrongs from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe.  

~Memory Chirere, author and poet