The Ones We Loved

An aching love story and literary debut about two strangers whose paths converge in a series of seemingly chance encounters and shared histories

On a bus moving across rural landscapes from town to town, two young people are escaping with nothing to hold except hope. She has committed a horrifying act for which there will certainly be retribution. He is staggering from a devastating discovery. They will find each other and attempt to move forward, even as their grief leaves wounds on their new beginnings.

But the talons of the past have dug deep and the wounds have not yet healed. Moving back and forth in time, from the fragile bonds of this new relationship to the lives they lived before, The Ones We Loved tenderly reveals characters whose ways of loving are inherited and channeled into the lands they inhabit, the people they care for and the present they cling to.

Told in the rhythms of oral retellings practiced in Zimbabwe, where a ngano (story)—its melodies, pauses and lifts—creates a call-and-response with the audience, The Ones We Loved is about the homes we leave behind, the lonely voices that find us and the painful consequences of experiencing a love that has never known how to let go.