Product Description
We Need New Names
Author: NoViolet Bulawayo
Format: Paperback
Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2013
Guardian First Book Award 2013
The Folio Prize 2014
Etisalat Prize for Literature 2014
PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction 2014
Barnes and Noble Discover Award for Fiction 2014
Society of Authors Awards: Trask Award 2014
2014 Zora Neale Hurston/ Richard Wright Legacy Award 2014
I.M.P.A.C. Dublin Award 2015
**Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2013**
Ten-year-old Darling has a choice: it's down, or out
'To play the country-game, we have to choose a country. Everybody wants to be the USA and Britain and Canada and Australia and Switzerland and them. Nobody wants to be rags of countries like Congo, like Somalia, like Iraq, like Sudan, like Haiti and not even this one we live in - who wants to be a terrible place of hunger and things falling apart?'
Darling and her friends live in a shanty called Paradise, which of course is no such thing. It isn't all bad, though. There's mischief and adventure, games of Find bin Laden, stealing guavas, singing Lady Gaga at the tops of their voices.
They dream of the paradises of America, Dubai, Europe, where Madonna and Barack Obama and David Beckham live. For Darling, that dream will come true. But, like the thousands of people all over the world trying to forge new lives far from home, Darling finds this new paradise brings its own set of challenges - for her and also for those she's left behind.
'Extraordinary' — Daily Telegraph
'A debut that blends wit and pain... Heartrending...wonderfully original' — Independent
'Sometimes shocking, often heartbreaking but also pulsing with colour and energy' — The Times
*NoViolet's new book Glory has been Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2022 and is out now*
About the Author
NOVIOLET BULAWAYO grew up in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. When she was eighteen, she moved to Kalamazoo, Michigan. Her first novel, We Need New Names, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the Guardian First Book Award and the Barnes & Noble Discover Award, and won a Betty Trask Award, Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, Hurston-Wright Legacy Award, the Etisalat Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction. She has also won the Caine Prize for African Writing and a National Book Award's '5 Under 35'. NoViolet earned her MFA at Cornell University, and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, where she taught fiction. She currently writes full-time, from wherever she finds herself.
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