Girl Who Married a Lion, The (Folk Tales from Africa)

The author of the popular No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency collected these 17 beautiful folktales from oral storytellers in his native Zimbabwe and in neighbouring Botswana. He has written them down in a way which preserves their subtle simplicity while beckoning a new audience of all ages.

Children and older readers will be both chilled and moved by the tale of a girl drowned while fetching water, then reassembled as a skeleton child by crocodiles intent on comforting her grieving sister. They can choose whether to despise or sympathise with the viciously scheming Hare, who takes the Anansi-like role of the selfish trickster in these stories. They can savour the nemesis visited upon a hunter, addicted to danger, who invites a beautiful and mysterious woman into the hut in which he is preparing two leopard cubs for sacrifice.

In his introduction the author underlines the didactic element of the folktale (‘Nobody thinks that they are true, but what they tell us about how people think and behave may be very true indeed’), but the stories themselves can be enjoyed as miniature fantasies with the moral left to inference. This is a superb little collection, highly recommended for solitary and social reading. GH