City of Kings Trilogy Bundle

From 2022 Windham Campbell Prize winner Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu, the complete collection of her multiple award-winning City of Kings trilogy, “perhaps the most monumental trilogy to come out of Southern Africa” (Afrocritik).

In The Theory of Flight, Imogen Zula Nyoni, lovingly referred to as Genie, lies in a coma at Mater Dei Hospital after having suffered through a long illness. As family and friends struggle to come to terms with her impending death, Ndlovu explores the history of Genie’s forebears: Baines Tikiti, who, because of his wanderlust, changed his name and ended up walking into the Indian Ocean; his son, Livingstone Stanley Tikiti, who, during the war, took as his nom de guerre Golide Gumede and who became obsessed with flight; and Golide's wife, Elizabeth Nyoni, a country-and-western singer self-styled after Dolly Parton. From colonial occupation through the freedom struggle, The Theory of Flight explores decades of history of a Southern Africa country which is never named.

In The History of Man, Emil Coetzee, a civil servant in his fifties, is washing blood off his hands when the ceasefire for his country’s civil war is announced. Like everyone else, he feels unmoored by the end of the conflict. War had given him his sense of purpose, his identity. But why has Emil's life turned out so different from his parents’, who spent cheery Friday evenings flapping and flailing the Charleston or dancing the foxtrot? What happened to the Emil who used to wade through the singing elephant grass of the savannah, losing himself in it? With empathy, generosity, and a light touch, Ndlovu explores decades of history through the eyes of one man on his journey from boyhood to manhood, and the changes that befall him through love, loss, and war.

In The Quality of Mercy, Spokes Moloi, the first black chief inspector in the City of Kings, is handed one final crime on the eve of his retirement: the possible murder of Mr. Coetzee, the notorious head of the Organization of Domestic Affairs, who disappeared on the same day the country's independence beckoned. In investigating Emil’s disappearance, Spokes' path collides with a soirée of witnesses with the best and worst of intentions—including a pair of corrupt investigators with an eye towards framing the terrorist Golide Gumede for Emil’s murder, and the insatiable public, infatuated with Emil and unable to come to terms with the fact that the future they had so long anticipated had, at last, arrived.