Continue reading “The Little Ambulance War of Winchester County”
The Little Ambulance War of Winchester County
Below Luck Level
Holiday Gift Guide
It’s reading season! The Catalyst team has assembled some of our favorites for all the book-lovers on your gift list this year!
Got a young bookworm at home? Here are my top picks for teen and tween readers.—SarahBelle Selig, South African office manager/publicity
A young boy brings his community together in a creative way in The Cedarville Shop & the Wheelbarrow Swap. Set in the last days of South Africa’s apartheid-era, Halley’s Comet finds three teens in an unlikely friendship, bound by a shared secret. An ancient prophesy sets 16-year-old Ebba on a quest to save the world in The Thousand Steps, book one of the Fiery Spiral trilogy.
Continue reading “Holiday Gift Guide”
Q&A with Tsitsi Mapepa
Introducing our readers to new and emerging voices in the literary space is our favorite thing to do here at Catalyst Press. One voice in particular stands out to me this year: Tsitsi Mapepa, the debut author of Ndima Ndima, which releases on November 7th.
Born and raised in Zimbabwe, now living in New Zealand, Tsitsi received her Master’s in Creative Writing from the University of Auckland in 2020. Her work is honest, heart-wrenching, and illuminating—and we are so honored to share it with our readers. Booklist calls Ndima Ndima “[a] truly insightful debut from an exciting new Zimbabwean author with a talent for writing the human experience,” and we couldn’t agree more!
Recently, I had the opportunity to sit down with Tsitsi and chat a little bit about this incredible story.
SarahBelle Selig: Tsitsi. thank you so much for making time to speak with me! To start off, tell me about the process of writing Ndima Ndima.
Tsitsi Mapepa: I am a perfectionist, I want things organized, but when it comes to my writing, I am a pantser (I work by the seat of my pants). The stories in Ndima Ndima were never written in order. It helped me when I got stuck, unsure of what to write following the finished story. So I jumped to the most exciting stories I had in mind. I still do this, even when I’m writing a novel. I know some writers would find it strange and time consuming when it comes to structural development, but that’s just how I craft my stories.
SS: Have you always enjoyed writing?
TM: Yes, I started writing when I was young. When I was in high school I attempted writing a novel, which I never finished. And I also wrote a collection of poetry on loose papers and notebooks.
SS: You emigrated from Zimbabwe in 2007. What was been your expat experience? Did writing Ndima Ndima feel like going home?
TM: I moved to New Zealand because my husband was already here. So, for the two of us, it was a new beginning. For me, the most challenging thing was raising our children in the absence of our closed ones. In our culture, we strongly rely on other family members for extra support.
When it came to creating the landscape in Ndima Ndima, it was like scraping for the images of a home buried at the core of my heart. This part of the novel left me with a smiling soul, because I could see what I miss on the page.
Wanjikũ, Child of Mine
Ndima Ndima
Peter Church on his Dark Web Trilogy
Editor’s Note: We’re revisiting this 2020 Q&A with Peter because now you can buy all three of his thrillers in one convenient bundle! The Dark Web Trilogy bundle is out on May 16, and pre-orders are available now.
Peter Church’s Dark Web Trilogy takes readers to the dark side of our digital lives. Starting with Crackerjack, these interconnected techno-thrillers explore the dangers lurking in a shadowy, underground world where the virtual and the physical collide in dangerous ways. The final installment in the series, Bitter Pill, comes to US readers on June 15. We caught up with Peter to chat about the series, his process for writing these connected stories, and if we might see more from the characters his created.
Captive: New Short Fiction from Africa
The Quality of Mercy
The Writer’s Notebook: Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu
As many of you know, Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu won a Windham-Campbell award in 2022. It has been a whirlwind here ever since, so we can only imagine what it’s like for Siphiwe! We’re a tiny press with a tiny staff, but we have such an enormous love for our authors and their books, and the Windham-Campbell Prize recognizing one of those authors feels amazing. As part of her award tour, Siphiwe has been featured in the Yale Review‘s special Windham-Campbell issue and, most recently, just wrote a beautiful essay for the Windham-Campbell “Writer’s Notebook” series.
We couldn’t be prouder to publish Siphiwe’s gorgeous and innovative writing. Her award-winning novels The Theory of Flight and The History of Man are both out now, with the final book in her City of Kings Trilogy, The Quality of Mercy, out this fall. Below is an excerpt of her Writer’s Notebook piece where she discusses the inspiration for The Quality of Mercy.
I will always say this because it is true—my grandmother was a phenomenal storyteller. She could make any story come into Technicolor life: an oral fable passed down through the generations, an unexpectedly spectacular thing that one of her students had done, a past event that she retrieved from the vast treasure trove that was her memory. A few years before she died in 2014, she told me a story about a man who instantly fell so in love with a woman that he followed her all the way to her village where he was immediately set the task of solving a mystery in order to win her hand in marriage. This story was the genesis of what would become my third novel, The Quality of Mercy.