The Architecture of Loss

“Z. P. Dala is a writer who has suffered much for her art and is well worth reading.” – Salman Rushdie“South African author Z. P. Dala’s crisp writing exhumes the festering pieces of the past in a story that strives toward hope and forgiveness.” * World Literature Today *“The Architecture of Loss vividly reconstructs the secret soul of South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement, revealing the costs—physical and emotional—of devoting one’s life to an ideal. The story of Sylvie Pillay, an Indian doctor who counts herself among ‘the silent sisters of the movement,’ is an essay on love and loss that will challenge conventional ideas about the drive for freedom. ‘The divide between men and women in the struggle made us unhappy in our conjoined twinness,’ she confides. ‘It became a silent code. Yet another code we had to learn.’ Z. P. Dala’s mastery of this code lines every page of this beautifully written and desperately moving novel.” – Christopher Merrill, author of ‘Self-Portrait with Dogwood’

Z.P. Dala is a freelance writer and psychologist. Her debut novel What About Meera won the inaugural Minara Aziz Hassim Literary Prize in South Africa and was longlisted for both the Etisalat Prize for Fiction (the most prestigious literary prize for African fiction) and the Sunday Times Barry Ronge Fiction Prize (South Africa’s largest literary award). Her short stories were awarded second prize in the Witness True Stories of KwaZulu Natal and she has written opinion pieces for The New York Times Magazine, Marie Claire, and Elle. In 2017, she received an Honorary Fellowship in Writing at the International Writers Program at the University of Iowa. She has lived and worked in Dublin and now lives in Durban, South Africa.

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