This unflinching and powerful novel tells the "deeply felt and fiercely written" story of a young girl's journey out of Zimbabwe to America (New York Times Book Review). Darling is only ten years old, and yet she must navigate a fragile and violent world. In Zimbabwe, Darling and her friends steal guavas, try to get the baby out of young Chipo's belly, and grasp at memories of Before. Before their homes were destroyed by paramilitary policemen, before the school closed, before the fathers left for dangerous jobs abroad. But Darling has a chance to escape: she has an aunt in America. She travels to this new land in search of America's famous abundance only to find that her options as an immigrant are perilously few. NoViolet Bulawayo's debut calls to mind the great storytellers of displacement and arrival who have come before her — from Junot Diaz to Zadie Smith to J.M. Coetzee — while she tells a vivid, raw story all her own."Original, witty, and devastating." —People
NoViolet Bulawayo's story "Hitting Budapest," the opening chapter of the novel, won the 2011 Caine Prize for African Writing. NoViolet's other work has been shortlisted for the 2009 SA PEN Studzinsi Award, and has appeared in Callaloo, The Boston Review, Newsweek, and The Warwick Review, as well as in anthologies in Zimbabwe, South Africa and the UK.
NoViolet recently earned her MFA at Cornell University, where her work has been recognized with a Truman Capote Fellowship. She will be attending Stanford in the fall as a Wallace Stegner Fellow for 2012-2014. NoViolet was born and raised in Zimbabwe.
Congratulations to Shehan Karunatilaka! The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is the winner of the 2022 Booker Prize. The Booker Prize’s short list was made up of the following five titles with Mr. Karunatilaka’s novel. They represent must-read fiction judged to be the best works written in English published in the UK and Ireland. As one of the leading […]
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“And within that time, I realized that the story needed to be about regular citizens. But because so much had been written. I found myself needing a new way of telling the story, a story that was very public, that was on everybody’s lips.” In 2017, Robert Mugabe was deposed in coup, an act that […]