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 (pen name of Elizabeth Tshele) is a Zimbabwean author, and Stegner Fellow at Stanford University (2012–2014).Bulawayo won the 2011 Caine Prize for African Writing for her short story "Hitting Budapest," about a gang of street children in a Zimbabwean shantytown.Her first novelWe Need New Names(2013) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, making her the first African female writer to earn this distinction.She has begun work on a memoir project.
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