Thoughtful, insightful and compelling, Granite is a well-executed imagining of what happened to cause the collapse of the civilisation of Great Zimbabwe (called Zimba Remabwe in the book). While adult historical fiction has experienced a recent resurgence in interest, narratives are mostly drawn from European history; Granite is refreshingly African, illuminating a relatively unexplored area in fiction. It also shifts "fictionalised history" away from the European centre: in the story, Zimba Remabwe exists as a sophisticated African city state well integrated with the rest of the mid-fifteenth-century world. It is a world in which Arab scholars travel from China and India to Europe and Britain, filing their chronicles in the revered library of Timbuktu. The narrative method is worth noting: because he cannot write, the story is dictated by a young nobleman called Mokomba - one of few survivors of his city's downfall. The penman is Shafiq, a learned Arab traveller who is a father figure after the passing of Mokomba's own father. Each chapter relates a series of events from these two characters' perspectives, as they fill in what the other might have glossed over.
The result is a finely rendered narrative of two distinct voices.
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Jenny Robson was born in South Africa and now lives in Botswana. She has won many important awards for her children's books, including the Unesco Prize for Children's and Young People's Literature in the Service of Tolerance.
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