Absent. the English Teacher

When MR George loses his job teaching English at a private secondary school in Bulawayo, `his pension payout, after forty years of full-time service, bought him two jam doughnuts and a soft tomato. `When he backs his unmsured white Ford Escort into a brand new Mercedes Benz. the out-of-court settlement sees him giving up his house to the complainant. Beauticious Nyamayakanuna. and becoming her domestic servant.

Through the prism of this engaging post-colonial role reversal, and spiced with George's lessons on Shakespeare, John Eppel draws down the curtain on one particular white man in Africa.

But before it's time to go, George will delight us with the antics of his literature classes; his various arrests --- all timed to coincide with the police chief's need for help with essays on Hamlet and A Grain ofWheat; his keen eye for flora and fauna; and the long trek back through the hundred years of his family's Zimbabwean past, as he returns an abandoned child to her home.

Eppel has satirised the racial politics of southern Africa in many of his previous novels. In Absent: The English Teacher he turns his gaze inwards for a generous and richly rewarding parody of the land of his birth.

`...a welcome contribution to the literatures of the region, and Zimbabwe in particular...a satirical attack on the values and practices that have led to the meltdown not only of the economy, but of morals and commonsense. Robert Muponde, University of the Witwatersrand