Zoo City
by Lauren Beukes
Arthur C. Clarke Award 2011, World Fantasy Award nominee 2011.
Zinzi has a talent for finding lost things. To save herself, she has to find the hardest thing of all... the truth.
Zinzi has a Sloth on her back, a dirty 419 scam habit and a talent for finding lost things. But when a client turns up dead and the cops confiscate her last paycheck, she’s forced to take on her least favourite kind of job – missing persons.
Being hired by famously reclusive music producer Odi Huron to find a teenybop pop star should be her ticket out of Zoo City, the festering slum where the criminal underclass, marked by their animals, live in the shadow of the undertow.
Instead, it catapults Zinzi deeper into the underbelly of a city twisted by crime and magic, where she’ll be forced to confront the dark secrets of former lives – including her own.
Zoo City is the intoxicating second novel from the author of the critically acclaimed Moxyland. Set in a wildly re-imagined Johannesburg, it swirls refugees, crime, the music industry, African magic and the nature of sin together into a heady brew. It’s a riveting contemporary muti noir with echoes of China Miéville and Philip Pullman.
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Lauren Beukes
Lauren Beukes is a journalist who has contributed to The Big Issue, Colors, The Hollywood Reporter, Marie Claire, Nature Medicine, and The Sunday Times. She is the head writer for the TV cartoon Clockwork Zoo Animation, the cocreator of the show URBO: The Adventures of Pax Afrika, and the author of Maverick: Extraordinary Women From South Africa’s Past, which was nominated for the Sunday Times Alan Paton nonfiction award.
