Nervous Conditions is a novel by Zimbabwean author Tsitsi Dangarembga, first published in the United Kingdom in 1988. It was the first book published by a black woman from Zimbabwe in English. It was one of the BBC's top 100 books that changed the world in 2018 and it won the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 1989.The semi-autobiographical novel focuses on the story of a Shona family in post-colonial Rhodesia during the 1960s. Nervous Conditions is the first of a proposed trilogy, with The Book of Not as the second novel in the series. The novel illustrates the dynamic themes of race, colonialism, and gender during the post-colonial conditions of present-day Zimbabwe. The title is taken from the introduction by Jean-Paul Sartre to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth.