LOCAL author Bryony Rheam’s novel, This September Sun, was launched at the ongoing Cairo International Book Fair on Wednesday after it was translated into Arabic, NewsDay Life & Style has heard.
BY SHARON SIBINDI
The novel was first published in 2009 by amaBooks in Bulawayo, while a second edition was published in 2012.
Brian Jones, the amaBooks Publishers director said the book was published by an Egyptian publishing company Al Arabi, which launched 43 other titles at the book fair.
“Al Arabi will also distribute the Arabic version of the book across the Arab world, where the English version is already available through the Jordan-based website jamalon.com. The rights to the novel have been acquired for Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and South Sudan by Longhorn Press, and for the United Kingdom by Parthian Books. The book topped the United Kingdom Amazon charts, as an ebook, in June 2013,” he said.
This September Sun won the Best First Book Award at the Zimbabwe Book Publishers Awards and was a Zimbabwe Schools Examinations Council ‘A’ Level Literature in English setbook between 2013 and 2017.
Egyptian publisher, Sherif Bakr described This September Sun, which is one of the longest novels at the fair, as “huge, but beautiful”.
Rheam is an ardent fan of Agatha Christie, a passion inherited from her grandmother. As testimony to this enthusiasm for Christie, she won the international Write Your Own Christie competition, which involved writing a chapter of a novel in the style of Agatha Christie, following on from chapters of previous winners.
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Her eagerly anticipated second novel, All Come to Dust, is undergoing final edits before being published by amaBooks in Zimbabwe in a few months’ time.
In 2018, Rheam was awarded a Morland Writing Scholarship to support her while she was writing her third novel, The Dying of the Light, set in Bulawayo just as some of her previous novels.
