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It's almost better if you don't know the modern history of Zimbabwe (nee Rhodesia) before reading Yvonne Vera's new novel, The Stone Virgins. This short, powerful book, which won the inaugural Macmillan Writer's Prize for Africa and should be read again and again, is a vivid introduction to that clearly beautiful but violence- (and now hunger) torn nation. Writing no more and no less than necessary, Vera demonstrates what fiction does best: showing us how it felt to be there.

The novel's first half spans the period 1950-80 and the struggle for independence from white rule, the second the six shocking years following. We begin in Bulawayo, the second-largest city, which Vera describes in an economic but elegant and provocative mix of hard nouns and verbs and abstract ideas, of rambling sentences and staccato fragments that connect civilization, nature, and us: ''The city revolves in sharp edges; roads cut at right angles.... Streets are wide. Widest at intersections.... The edge of a building is a profile, a corner ... ekoneni. The word is pronounced with pursed lips and lyrical minds, with arms pulsing, with a memory begging for time. Ekoneni, they say, begging for ease, for understanding.'' The fragments can seem affected and overdone, yet once accepted they create a rhythm suggestive of the country's lurching history.

For it is the best of times - lovers rendezvous at these ekoneni and in hotel basements, sipping beer, listening to jazz, talking about the time Satchmo played there - and the worst: These are the only places blacks are allowed; they must drink from glasses cut from empty beer bottles; war rages in the bush.

From there to Kezi, 200 kilometers southeast, a village that fits how we are used to imagining Africa: thatched huts, trees bearing aromatic fruit, a crowded, barely running bus. Off of which comes a Bulawayo man whom Thenjiwe, one of two Kezi sisters, meets and takes home. ''She has a lot to forget, so this is all right. She has no idea now, or ever, that some of the harm she has to forget is in the future, not in the past.'' Such masterful bits of foreshadowing are frequent. The intense ensuing love affair falters due to, like so many other things in the novel - and Zimbabwe itself, Vera implies - a lack of words.

Following a beautiful chapter describing the quiet, stunned joy of independence, one of the sisters is brutally murdered, the other raped and maimed. The remainder of the novel movingly interweaves the survivor's excruciating recovery with an exploration of the killer's mind. In both threads, but particularly the latter, we are witness to one of Vera's great strengths: her fantastic ability to conceive and get inside her distinct and complicated characters down to the last thought and detail: ''I am a man who is set free, Sibaso, one who remembers harm. They remember nothing. ... These scarred hands, the flesh missing, are scented hands. An inch burned from every finger. The smallest of my fingers no longer bends. Something went quiet inside my head. I heard it stop like a small wind. ... I bit my thumb and felt nothing. I bit hard and reached the bone. This is how I lost the flesh there. I wanted to reach something, to restore feeling. A nerve had vanished.'' Rather than condemn Sibaso, Vera seeks to understand him.

And although he's one of the dissidents who took up arms against Mugabe's then-new government, there is plenty of blame to go around, and Vera elsewhere describes ''soldiers'' committing atrocities, thus implying government forces. Imply is all she can do, however, for Zimbabwe is now a one-party dictatorship, and Mugabe is burnishing his image for the history books. Over the past few years his militant supporters have killed numerous opposition party members and harassed and jailed journalists, writers, and artists who have criticized his government.

''There has been an absolute fear of even talking about [this period],'' Vera told The New York Times in October. ''For two years I did not write it. But it was not possible for me to have that self-censorship. I wanted to say, This is how it was. Just that. ... We weren't past this violence; we have remained in that.''

Vera's goal is not to assign guilt but to break the silence, to end the lack of words, and thus her answers are indefinite and speculative. The Stone Virgins is, I believe, her way of asking why.

We must thus keep an eye on Yvonne Vera, who, unlike a number of her colleagues, has not fled Zimbabwe, and runs the National Art Gallery in Bulawayo. Not only because after this book we will hunger for more, but also because she dares speak unpleasant truths inside her own country.

Eric Grunwald is managing editor of Agni magazine and is currently writing a novel.

This story ran on page D8 of the Boston Globe on 2/2/2003. © Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.

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