52 Books by 52 Women: We Need New Names
For a year I’m reading 52 books by women authors whose work I’ve never read before. Click here for previous installments.
We Need New Names is the 2013 debut novel by 32-year-old author NoViolet Bulawayo, born and raised in Zimbabwe and now living in the United States, where she’s a Stegner Fellow at Stanford. It’s told from the point of view of a 10-year-old girl, Darling, in a shantytown in Zimbabwe. The country is never named in the novel—it’s always “our country” and “our language”—but it’s not exactly hidden either, with references to white self-identified “Rhodesians” and the Limpopo River border with South Africa.
