We Need New Names
From the twice Booker-shortlisted author of GLORY
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3.9 • 35 Ratings
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
**SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE **
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 newest book Glory - shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2022 - is out now*
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Sentences cartwheel, spin and fly off the pages of NoViolet Bulawayo’s remarkable debut novel. This is the heartbreaking story of Darling and her family and friends, and, by extension, modern-day Zimbabwe and the African diaspora. Bulawayo softens the blow of her painful subject matter—atrocities committed by President Robert Mugabe and his followers; poverty, AIDS, displacement—by narrating the novel from Darling’s bold, bright-eyed and often humorous perspective. When we meet Darling, she’s 10 and living with her grandmother in Paradise, a shantytown of tin shacks and colourful characters. She spends her days playing games with her pack of friends and gorging on guavas stolen from the trees dotting the walled-in yards of Budapest, a well-to-do neighbourhood. Darling leaves this life behind when she moves to the U.S. to live with her aunt and attend middle school in “Destroyedmichygen”. With searing honesty and dazzling insight, Bulawayo has captured the limbo lives of recent immigrants, who long for the homes they’ve left behind but yearn to claim a stake in the relative prosperity and stability of their adopted homes. We Need New Names pulses with sadness, anger and beautiful compassion.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The short story that was adapted to become the first chapter of this debut novel by current Stegner fellow Bulawayo won the Caine Prize in 2011, known as the African Booker. Indeed the first half of the book, which follows a group of destitute but fearless children in a ravaged, never-named African country, is a remarkable piece of literature. Ten-year-old Darling is Virgil, leading us through Paradise, the shantytown where she and her friends Bastard, Godknows, Sbho, and Stina live and play. "Before," they lived in real houses and went to school that is, before the paramilitary policemen came and destroyed it all, before AIDS, before Darling's friend Chipo was impregnated by her own grandfather. Now they roam rich neighborhoods, stealing bull guavas and hiding in trees while gangs raid white homes. Darling and her friends invent new names for themselves from American TV and spent their time trying to get "rid of Chipo's stomach." Abruptly, Darling lands with her aunt in America, seen as an ugly place, and absorbs the worst of its culture Internet porn, obscene consumerism, the depreciation of education. Darling may not be worse off, but her life has not improved in any meaningful way. When Bulawayo won the Caine Prize, she said, "I want to go and write from home. It's a place which inspires me. I don't feel inspired by America at all," and the chapters set outside of Africa make this abundantly clear. In this promising novel's early chapters, Bulawayo's use of English is disarmingly fresh, her arrangement of words startling.
Customer Reviews
We need new names - NoViolet Bulaweyo
Off the shelf recommended this book. And so do I. This is an insightful, rare book, engaging interest at every level: characters, predicaments, folklore. I heard the childhood stories, felt the yearning for the country left behind. Another,book, please, NoViolet!
So deserves to be on the booker shortlist
This book holds true for all migrants, wherever they find themselves. It resonates with the stories of my family who grew up in the so called slums of Glasgow. How a small boy saw bombing raids as a thing to watch and so practical about friends being dug out. So far from Zimbabwe but common experience through the eyes of children. The description of growing up as a migrant so earthy you can feel it.
So beautifully simple but so very clever to capture the very essence.