Books from Zambia

What does it mean to return home when the place you left has become a stranger—and the past you are returning to is full of unanswered questions? In Prodigal, award-winning poet Kayo Chingonyi traces the journey from a childhood shaped by loss to an adult reckoning with his Zambian heritage. In 1993, following his father’s death, six-year-old Kayo is sent from Zambia to Newcastle, England. Growing up in Britain, he gradually learns the circumstances surrounding his parents’ deaths from HIV-related illnesses. The stigma surrounding their deaths leaves him carrying grief, shame, and questions about a family history he struggles to understand. Nearly twenty-five years later, a message from a cousin in Zambia prompts Chingonyi to reconsider the distance separating him from his birthplace. His return becomes an opportunity to piece together fragments of memory, confront the silences surrounding his childhood, and reconsider what he has inherited from the people he lost. Moving between Zambia and Britain, Chingonyi explores migration, bereavement, cultural belonging, and the complicated process of making peace with one’s past. Music, poetry, and family memories become ways of reconnecting with what has been lost. Prodigal is an intimate memoir about discovering that returning home is not simply about retracing your steps—it is about learning to understand the person you have become.