By turns alluring and provocative, the stories in An Elegy for Easterly mark the debut of a keenly perceptive talent. Inspired by her life in Harare, Zimbabwe, Petina Gappah blends fiction with headline events to examine everyday life under the cataclysmic regime of Robert Mugabe. From the ruling class to the impoverished, the characters in An Elegy for Easterly provide wry testament to their history: a politician’s widow watches as her husband’s funeral is used as propaganda, cutting a deal so that his “official” state coffin is a fake, while his body is quietly returned to the village of his birth; wealthy men, in denial about the AIDS crisis, establish “small houses” for their mistresses; expatriates in locales ranging from London to Dallas maintain uneasy ties with their struggling relatives back home; and an aging furniture maker dies on the dance floor of the Why Leave nightclub, succumbing to blissful disco exertion. Set in a country where corruption turns even the simplest transaction into a Kafka-esque farce, An Elegy for Easterly depicts the human spirit with verve and unflinching candor.