Cion A Novel [Paperback]

A Picador Paperback Original

The hero of Zakes Mda's belovedWays of Dying,Toloki, sets down with a family in Middle America and uncovers the story of the runaway slaves who were their ancestors.

Toloki, the professional mourner, has come to live in America. Lured to Athens, Ohio, by an academic at the local university, Toloki makes friends with an angry young man he meets at a Halloween parade and soon falls in love with the young man's sister. Toloki endears himself to a local quilting group and his quilting provides a portal to the past, a story of two escaped slaves seeking freedom in Ohio.

Making their way north from Virginia with nothing but their mother's quilts for a map, the boys hope to find a promised land where blacks can live as free men. Their story alternates with Toloki's, as the two narratives cast a new light on America in the twenty-first century and on an undiscovered legacy of the Underground Railroad.

A marvelous picaresque. The New York Times Book Review on Ways of Dying

Darkly comic and sadly poignant, Mda possesses the lyricism of a storyteller. San Diego Union-Tribune on Ways of Dying

Discussion Questions

1. The book starts and ends with a mention of the sciolist. Who is he? What is his role in the novel?

2. Ain't we all from stories, Obed asks Toloki (pg. 13). We are indeed all from stories. Every one of us. All humanity, Toloki answers. What does he mean? How does this idea apply to the larger story, to the connections between the past and present narratives?3. Discuss the relationship of the flashback stories to the present-day narrative. What thematic connections do you see between the two? Are there characters in the 19th-century narrative that you think correspond directly to the present-day story?

4.Cionis the first of the author's novels to be set in America. How do you think his portrait of America differs from others you've lĪ