A01=Mubanga Kalimamukwento
African literary fiction
Author_Mubanga Kalimamukwento
Category=FBA
Category=FXT
cultural expectations of women
domestic abuse fiction
eq_bestseller
eq_fiction
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_modern-contemporary
eq_nobargain
forthcoming
literary courtroom drama
marriage and violence
moral complicity
motherhood and silence
patriarchal systems
prize-winning novel
women and endurance
women on trial
Zambian fiction
Product details
- ISBN 9781913175900
- Dimensions: 135 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 23 Jul 2026
- Publisher: Cassava Republic Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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A woman on trial. A marriage built on silence. A culture that demands endurance.
Sali, a working mother of three, is on trial for the murder of her husband, Kasunga. Accused of shooting him after a fight in their bedroom, she pleads not guilty and must rely on an overworked legal aid lawyer as a courtroom hungry for judgement looks on.
Fourteen years earlier, Sali's life was shaped by a different kind of violence. The pressure to conform, to endure, to shipikisha. When an affair with a wealthy, married man ends in sudden death, she enters a loveless marriage to escape the shame of unwed motherhood. What follows is a life marked by infidelity, financial strain, postnatal depression and quiet suffering, until endurance finally gives way.
Told through a braided narrative moving between past and present, The Shipikisha Club is a powerful literary novel about marriage, motherhood and the devastating cost of silence in contemporary Zambia.
Mubanga Kalimamukwento is a Zambian writer and criminal lawyer. Her debut novel The Mourning Bird won the Dinaane Debut Fiction Award, and her work has received the Drue Heinz Literature Prize and the 2024 Dzanc Prize for Fiction. She holds an MFA from Hamline University and lives in Minnesota, USA.
