This book sounds positively crazy, and that’s why its getting some facetime here on AITH.
Helena Spring, widely regarded as one of South Africa’s most accomplished motion picture producers, has just been awarded the highly sought-after film rights to ZOO CITY, the Sci-Fi thriller penned by South African author Lauren Beukes – who garnered the 2011 Arthur C. Clarke Award for best Science Fiction novel.
The urban fantasy is set in a futuristic, gritty and hard-core Johannesburg where the eponymous ghetto has been colonised by society’s outcasts – like criminals, drug-dealers and psychopaths, and their animal companions. Like the other residents of the Zoo City slum, Zinzi, the anti-heroine, is “animalled”, but she is also a shrewd, street-smart girl with the gift (or burden) of finding lost things. Zinzi wears her power animal, a sloth, on her back. When she is hired to find a missing teenybopper star, she hopes that it will be her ticket out of Hell’s waiting room.
It almost sounds like what The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo would look like with a sloth on her shoulder. Weird, wild stuff.
Spring’s career in the entertainment industry spans nearly three decades, during which time she has produced over twenty motion pictures – including the first ever South African film to receive recognition at the Academy Awards: Darrell Roodt’s YESTERDAY earned a Best Foreign Picture nomination in 2004.
We’ll keep you updated on ZOO CITY as more info about the film comes to light.
Author Lauren Beukes