This book will be released in January 2026
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NOMINATED FOR THE 2023 BULAWAYO ARTS AWARDS FOR OUTSTANDING LITERARY WORK
NOMINATED FOR A ZIMBABWE NATIONAL ARTS MERIT AWARD
Whatever happened to Rick Astley? She imagined that he was happily married with children. A record producer, perhaps? That was the usual way with singers, wasn’t it?
From Bryony Rheam, the award-winning author of All Come to Dust and This September Sun, comes a collection of sixteen short stories shining a spotlight on life in Zimbabwe over the last twenty years. The daily routines and the greater fate of ordinary Zimbabweans are represented with a deft, compassionate touch and flashes of humour.
From the potholed side streets of Bulawayo to lush, blooming gardens, traversing down- at-heel bars and faded drawing rooms, the stories in The Colonel Comes By ring with hope and poignancy, and pay tribute to the resilience of the human spirit.
Bryony Rheam was born in Kadoma, Zimbabwe in 1974. She is the author of This September Sun, which won Best First Book Award in 2010 and was Number 1 on Amazon Kindle in 2013. Her second novel, All Come to Dust, was published in 2020. She has also published a range of short stories in various anthologies. In 2014, she won an international competition to write a chapter of an Agatha Christie novel, the prize being dinner at Agatha Christie’s house in Devon with her grandson, Matthew Pritchard. She was a recipient of the 2018 Miles Morland Writing scholarship. Bryony is an English teacher at Girls’ College and lives in Bulawayo with her partner, John, and their two children, Sian and Ellie.