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|title=The Cry of the Go-Away Bird

|sort=Cry of the Go-Away Bird

|publisher=Harvill Secker

|date=February 2011

|website=http://www.vintage-books.co.uk/authors/2799538/andrea-eames/

|summary=A well crafted, but imperfect, novel of a fraught Zimbabwean childhood.

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'The Cry of the Go-Away Bird' is the debut novel from Andrea Eames. It revolves around Elise, a white Zimbabwean girl living through her teens on the eve of the Mugabe-sponsored farm invasions at the beginning of this century. The author herself grew up in Zimbabwe before moving to New Zealand with her family at the age of seventeen and there is a strong sense of memoir and personal experience in the novel, which has both positive and negative effects on the narrative.

Overall, though well written, the novel is trying to tell too many stories in too many ways. Elise's story is cut-off by the dramatic political events occurring, but those events appear as from nowhere and lack real context. The book is still worth reading for a glimpse into this interesting and unfamiliar world, but there may be better novels to come from Andrea Eames.

[[When a Crocodile Eats the Sun by Peter Godwin]]<br>

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