Name: Glory
Author: NoViolet Bulawayo

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Content snapshot

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What's in this book, at a glance — five things readers want to know before they start.

Violence

Genocide, ethnic cleansing, police shootings of protesters, torture, and body horror, all rendered with deliberate specificity

Language

A lot

Slogans, chants, and social-media invective drive the prose, with profanity and political abuse throughout

Sexual Content

Very heavy

Rape and sexual violence during the massacres, plus a running thread of sex shaming aimed at the female characters

Substance Use

Some

Drinking appears around the political scenes

Emotional Intensity

Intergenerational trauma, state terror, and the exhaustion of a population that has watched liberation curdle

What this book is about

Bulawayo retells the 2017 Zimbabwean coup as the collapse of Old Horse's regime in a nation of talking animals, drawing on Orwell and on Zimbabwean oral tradition. Reader content warnings collected for the novel cover sex shaming, rape culture and rape, genocide and ethnic cleansing, police brutality and shootings, violence, gore and body horror, and political repression. The Conversation's 2022 assessment argues that Bulawayo refuses narrative distance — the attacks are specific and brutal, naming targets, perpetrators, physical effects, and the victims' internal experience. The Gukurahundi massacres, in particular, are not glossed. Booker-shortlisted in 2022.