Gappah's stories all touch on tragedy, but they aren't overwhelmed by it. One, about a local dancing competition, begins this way:
When the prices of everything went up ninety-seven times in one year, M'dhara Vitalis Mukaro came out of retirement to make the coffins in which we buried our dead. In a space of only six months, he became famous twice over, as the best coffin maker in the district and as the Mupandawana Dancing Champion.
The author now lives in Geneva — where she's an international trade lawyer — but grew up in Zimbabwe, and she succeeds in capturing a world that tourists could otherwise never hope to see: People, rich and poor, going about living their lives in the surreal shadow of a post-colonial regime.
In "Something Nice From London" a family waits at the Harare airport for a flight that will bring them the remains of their dead son. A police investigation has delayed the release of his body, and the extended family has already begun to descend on their home.
But how to tell people: please go away, we have not started officially to mourn? They have spent money to get here; the old aunts from Shurugwi have taken out their notes from the old pots in which they keep their money. And then to tell them: please, find more money, go away for now and come back later, wearing your most sorrowful faces.
The opening story, "At the Sound of the Last Post," sees a state funeral through the eyes of the widow of a "national hero" — a euphemism for those in Mugabe's inner circle who managed to remain in his good graces. As the eulogies continue, she remembers her husband's political corruption, the so-called small house he kept for his mistress, and the "long illness" that won't be mentioned in the state-run newspaper's obituary.
Perhaps the saddest of the stories is "Our Man In Geneva Wins a Million Euros," in which a Zimbabwean consular officer for the U.N. — new to both his duties and the Internet — is taken in by an online scam.
Gappah, as a Zimbabwean with a European education, is an ideal cultural translator. But she's an agile writer too: Her style, tone and perspective change dramatically from story to story — as does the socioeconomic status of her characters. But the book never loses coherence as a collection.
The characters in Gappah's stories accept the small and large tragedies of their daily lives as a given, and the author presents these constant indignities with the same inevitability. This backdrop of shadow makes the foreground action shine with an even richer, more rewarding and authentic hue. 
