Published 23rd July 2026 by Casava Republic Press.
From the cover of the book:
A woman on trial. A marriage built on silence. A culture that demands endurance.
Sali, a working mother of three, is on trial for the murder of her husband, Kasunga. Accused of shooting him after a fight in their bedroom, she pleads not guilty and must rely on an overworked legal aid lawyer as a courtroom hungry for judgement looks on.
Fourteen years earlier, Sali’s life was shaped by a different kind of violence. The pressure to conform, to endure, to shipikisha. When an affair with a wealthy, married man ends in sudden death, she enters a loveless marriage to escape the shame of unwed motherhood. What follows is a life marked by infidelity, financial strain, postnatal depression and quiet suffering, until endurance finally gives way.
Told through a braided narrative moving between past and present, The Shipikisha Club is a powerful literary novel about marriage, motherhood and the devastating cost of silence in contemporary Zambia.
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Mother of three, Sali is on trial for the murder of her abusive husband, Kasunga. She pleads not guilty to shooting him dead one night after his drunkenness turned into violence, but his family are determined she will pay for what she has done.
The story unfurls through the narratives of three generations of women from Sali's family (following a short prologue from Kasunga's mother, Mayo) - Sali herself, Sali's teenage daughter Ntashé, and Sali's mother Peggy - switching between Ntashé and Peggy's voices in the present, and a timeline that follows Sali's experiences from the day that changed the future she saw for herself.
The story comes together in a spectacular combination of tense court-room drama, coming of age heart-breaker, painful retrospective, and cultural analysis that explores a myriad facets around the expectations women face on entering the Shipikisha Club - a Zambian idiom that likens marriage to a test of endurance, and the requirement for female silence that comes with its many trials.
At the beginning of the story, Ntashé is on her way to the courtroom for the commencement of Sali's scadalous trial. She is negotiating a mass of contradictory feelings about the night that led to the break-up of her family, grief at the loss of a father she idolised, and confusion around the idea her mother may actually be guilty. Over the course of the trial she learns many things about her mother, her parent's relationship, and herself that shape her ideas about marriage, motherhood, and being a woman in Zambian society. Ntashé steals your heart as a girl lost in the consequences of events she does not understand.
The central core of the story is about Sali herself, examining the things the trial reveals, the ordeal she faces after her arrest, and what you learn about the experiences that led her to the pivotal moment when she was facing down a gun in Kasunga's hand. Kalimamukwento does an incredible job delving into the cultural and emotional threads that weave together around Sali, making a rich tapestry of the circumstances that precipitated a reluctant marriage to a man she did not love, and how his role as 'saviour' became a burden that eventually broke her. Sali is a difficult character to come to terms with at times, as she is written in well-judged shades of grey, but I liked how this makes her spring from the page as such an authentic character.
To complete the circle, the latter part of the novel introduces Peggy's reflections on her own marriage, her daughter, and her despair at how events have turned out. For me, Peggy is the hardest to like, as there is a bitter taste of complicity in what she shares about herself and her relationship with Sali, that I found very hard to accept as a mother myself.
The three women are an integral part of each other's stories, making a whole that incorporates a seriously impressive number of themes. Kalimamukwento touches on so much on around cultural traditions, family, fertility, religion, marriage, motherhood, violence against women, gender roles, expectation, guilt, shame, prejudice, and, of course, the endless cycle of dysfunction that patriarchal authority breeds.
Raw and powerful, this is a book that is going to stay with me for a long time.
I would love to see this one produced in audio format, as it is the perfect vehicle for three separate voice actors to take on the roles of Ntashé, Sali, and Peggy.
The Shipikisha Club by Mubanga Kalimamukwento is available to buy now in hardcover and ebook formats.
About the author:
Mubanga Kalimamukwento is a Zambian writer and criminal lawyer. Her debut novel The Mourning Bird won the Dinaane Debut Fiction Award, and her work has received the Drue Heinz Literature Prize and the 2024 Dzanc Prize for Fiction.
She holds an MFA from Hamline University and lives in Minnesota, USA.
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