Harare Review of Books

320 pp. June 17, 2025, Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Fiction.

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I liked this one for how different it was, and literary too; but in a world where stories are increasingly written as if they’re about to be adapted for the screen, it won’t be for everyone.

Everyone in the place has become numb; no one cries at funerals. So people hire professional mourners called Weepers who, with their tears, bring some gravitas and dignity to final goodbyes because what’s a funeral without visible grief? This is most of the story really, except for how the protagonist, Ed, becomes quite obsessed with a young man who drifts into town and who turns out to (maybe, probably) possess a special gift: that of making the people around him cry (even when he doesn’t himself).

I felt like there was a deeper allegory in this novel that I couldn’t quite reach, like just… there. Surely this young man (who’s never named; he’s just “the kid”) means something, if not to Ed then maybe as a kind of symbol of something … or something. It’s a frustrating feeling I had throughout my reading of this novel, that I could have gone deeper if I’d just … grasped the thing; but I never really did. (This may completely cultural for me because, unlike the assertion of the publisher’s copy, I cannot identify with this being an age of mass anaesthesia.) In a way it’s fine though, because the novel is perfectly readable, being very atmospheric, and with Ed’s “cowboy poetry” (samples included in the text) and a lot of Ed’s interiority, which is wry and also earnest and touching. (Ed has an intriguing kind of everyday profundity.)

So, read for a sense of place, because even though professional mourners do exist in the (or our) world, it’s interesting to imagine them in this place and context. Apart from a big climactic thing near the end of the novel, most of Weepers is the events in a slightly weird (and quite arid) small town someplace as seen through Ed the Cowboy-Poet’s eyes. Read also because Weepers is actually really well-written: It’s always interesting and both the mystery of the kid and Ed himself keep the story moving.

Thanks to FSG and NetGalley for early access.

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