What We Lose

A short, intense and profoundly moving debut novel about race, identity, sex and death – from one of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35

Thandi is a black woman, but often mistaken for Hispanic or Asian.

She is American, but doesn’t feel as American as some of her friends.

She is South African, but doesn’t belong in South Africa either.

Her mother is dying.

‘Zinzi Clemmons’s debut novel signals the emergence of a voice that refuses to be ignored’ Paul Beatty, winner of the Man Booker Prize 2016

‘Navigates the many registers of grief, loss and injustice … acutely moving’ Margo Jefferson, author of Negroland

‘Wise and tender and possessed of a fiercely insightful intimacy’ Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine


Genre: Literary Fiction

"Penetratingly good and written in vivid still life, What We Lose reads like a guided tour through a melancholic Van Gogh exhibit – wonderfully chromatic, transfixing and bursting with emotion. Zinzi Clemmons’s debut novel signals the emergence of a voice that refuses to be ignored." - Paul Beatty

"Wise and tender and possessed of a fiercely insightful intimacy, What We Lose is a lyrical ode to the complexities of race, love, illness, parenthood, and the hairline fractures they leave behind. Zinzi Clemmons has gifted the reader a rare and thoughtful emotional topography, a map to the mirror regions of their own heart." - Alexandra Kleeman

"I love how Zinzi Clemmons complicates identity in What We Lose. Her main character is both South African and American, privileged and outsider, driven by desire and gutted by grief. This is a piercingly beautiful first novel." - Danzy Senna

"An intimate narrative that often makes another life as believable as your own." - John Edgar Wideman