Zoo City

Zinzi December wakes up in her building, Elysium Heights, in Johannesburg. Her lover, Benoît, is sleeping in. Benoît’s animal familiar, a Mongoose, curls up on Zinzi’s laptop, while her own Sloth dozes in a cupboard. Zinzi dresses for work, tying a lime green scarf over her dreadlocks to hide her mangled left ear. She retrieves Mrs. Luditsky’s ring—a platinum ring with sapphires, which she’s been soaking to rid it of its sewer smell—and departs with Sloth to return the ring to her client.

Zinzi has a magical power: finding lost things. She perceives lost things as tied to a person by a string; some ties as inconsequential as spider webs, while others are as thick as steel cables. As she walks, Zinzi distributes flyers that make clear what she will and won’t find: “NO DRUGS. NO WEAPONS. NO MISSING PERSONS” (11). She recalls meeting her current client, Mrs. Luditsky, who lost her ring following an armed robbery at the local mall. Fearing criminals—“the animalled”—Mrs. Luditsky fled into a bathroom and used soap to coax her ring from her finger. The ring went down the drain and into the sewers, where Zinzi retrieved it.

As Zinzi and Sloth head toward Mrs.