The winner of the 2011 Arthur C Clarke award, this urban fantasy-noir thriller merges visions of dystopia with faultless plotting and Shona cosmology, bringing the spirit possession of traditional religion to a near-future Johannesburg. Zinzi December finds things, even when she doesn’t want to. When she’s hired to find a missing teenage pop star, it’s almost certain that her shavi (a compulsion or talent with a bitter cost) will bring disaster. There is rhyme and reason to this imagined future – and it’s a believable and engrossing vision.
Zoo City is set in an alternate version of the South African city of Johannesburg, in which people who have committed a crime are magically attached to an animal familiar – those who receive such punishment are said to be "animalled". The novel's chief protagonist, Zinzi December, is a former journalist and recovering drug addict who was "animalled" to a sloth after getting her brother killed. She lives in the Johannesburg suburb of Hillbrow, which is nicknamed "Zoo City" in the novel for its large population of animalled people, refugees and the dispossessed. Zinzi is attempting to repay the financial debt she owes her drug dealer by charging people for her special skill of finding lost objects, as well as making use of her writing abilities by drafting 419 fraud emails. The book's plot focuses on Zinzi's attempts to find the missing female member of a brother-and-sister pop duo for a music producer, in return for the money she needs to fully repay her dealer
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