We Need New Names
by NoViolet Bulawayo
She escapes Zimbabwe. Discovers escape is also a loss.
you've ever left somewhere to survive it and found that survival came with a price you didn't know you were paying
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Darling grows up in a Zimbabwean shantytown called Paradise — stealing guavas, playing games, watching the adults around her fall apart under economic and political collapse. Then she gets to America. The second half of the novel is the dispatch from inside the immigrant experience — the way a new country requires you to shed the person you were, and the specific grief of that shedding. Bulawayo writes with a ferocity and precision that makes every sentence feel necessary. One of the great debuts of the last decade.
WHERE THIS BOOK LIVES
- Setting
- Zimbabwe • Southern Africa
- Voice
- Written by a Zimbabwean author
- Themes
- War & Displacement
