An aching love story and literary debut for readers of Jael Richardson, NoViolet Bulawayo and Francesca Ekwuyasi

On a bus moving across a rural landscape, from town to dusty town, two young people are escaping with their lives. She has committed a crime for which there will be retribution. He is staggering from a sudden loss. These two will find each other and attempt a new way forward. 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 weaves both myth and memory. It’s a story about generational living written in the rhythms of oral retellings practiced by Zimbabwe’s Shona ethnic group, where the soundscape of a ngano (story)—its melodies, pauses, lifts and stops—creates a call-and-response interaction with the listener.

The novel also pulls from literary stewards of Black Americana such as Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston, shaping characters whose way of loving is inherited and channelled into the lands they inhabit, the people they care for and the present they cling to.

TARISAI NGANGURA is a journalist and photographer. Born and raised in Zimbabwe, she finished her post-secondary education at what was then Ryerson University in Canada. She has been based in several countries, reporting from Brazil, Canada and the US. Her photography, essays and interviews have appeared in T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Rolling Stone, Teen Vogue and the Globe and Mail, among other publications. Ngangura was formerly a writer and social manager at Vanity Fair and a senior content strategist at the Atlantic. She currently freelances and reviews music at Pitchfork and NPR. Her column on the buried histories of Black women artists can be found at Catapult. Ngangura lives in Manhattan. The Ones We Loved is her debut novel.

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"The Ones We Loved is a literary cat burglar. Steals your breath. Makes off with your time before you see it gone. Pockets your heart and hands it back—rewired. Tarisai Ngangura has penned a haunting, unforgettable story about a shattered girl and a shattered boy rebuilding their lives on the thinnest reeds of hope." — Lawrence Hill, author of The Book of Negroes

“If Toni Morrison is a language, Tarisai Ngangura speaks it as well as any novelist writing today: The jazz shaped sentences inside fragmented, narrative solos, yearning towards a communal, historical whole. Ngangura’s ordinary people claim our hearts with their commitment to living and loving notwithstanding an atmosphere of vicious oppression. Yet, the reader remains excruciatingly conscious of the private stories of brutalized loved ones her characters are loathe to share. In a magnificent novel, that seethes with beauty, passion and rage, Ngangura contemplates how to embrace a history composed of love and devastating pain.” — Donna Bailey Nurse