The Zambian author and public intellectual Norah Mumba uses the startling, memorable noun ‘overcomer’ to describe Luweme, the protagonist of her recent novel Knitted in Silence, in a late chapter titled ‘New Beginnings’. At that stage in the plot, Luweme has come a long way. She has grown from a silent, traumatised child into an empowered and articulate young woman. Her very presence inspires resolve, resilience and hope in those who know her. But the notion of an ‘overcomer’ – one who moves past obstacles and triumphs in the face of difficulties and dangers – does more than provide an abbreviated reference to the novel's fast-moving, adventure-time plot. It is also an index to how Mumba imagines the emergence of a modern Zambian subjectivity, and of how this imagining fits in with her country's literary history – a history that would not be legible to us today without Isabel Hofmeyr's The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of ‘The Pilgrim's Progress’ (2004).

Published in Lusaka in 2022, Knitted in Silence is an elaborate comingof- age story. It details Luweme's birth into a family of farm workers near the village of Laweni in contemporary Zambia; her family background; her separation from her parents; the political intrigue she survives as a child after her mother's death; and her eventual rise to confident adulthood as she assumes spiritual leadership of her community and develops extraordinary powers of healing. The novel's architecture segments this multi-strand narrative material into three parts. The first part initiates a cluster of unforeseen life-changing events for some of the characters in Laweni. The second outlines threatening developments in the heroine's maternal village of Kavuluvulu. The third returns Luweme, via Lusaka, to where her life began, and to the discovery that her old home environment has changed in unforeseen ways. The work of a Christian feminist author who is a well-established literary and activist figure in her home country, Knitted in Silence is interested in class difference and prejudice, in questions to do with the nature of evil, and in the spiritual properties of evangelical Christianity. The novel culminates in the sweeping away of all obstacles via a deep cosmic synthesis – and a wedding. Humorous and light-footed as well as serious and thought-provoking, Knitted in Silence is Bunyanesque in that it conceives of human life as a constant flow of new beginnings.