Winner of the 2014 PEN / Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction

Winner of the 2014 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction

Shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize

Winner of the 2014 Zora Neale Hurston/ Richard Wright Legacy Award for fiction

Winner of the 2013 Etisalat Prize for Literature

Finalist for the 2013 Guardian First Book Award

One of the New York Times Notable Books of the Year for 2013

One of National Public Radio's Great Reads of 2013 

A remarkable literary debut shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize: the unflinching and powerful story of a young girl's journey out of Zimbabwe and to America.

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.

BIO

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.

REVIEWS

"An exquisite and powerful first novel, filled with an equal measure of beauty and horror and laughter and pain. The lives (and names) of these characters will linger in your mind, and heart, long after you're done reading the book. NoViolet Bulawayo is definitely a writer to watch." --Edwidge Danticat, award-winning author of Brother, I'm Dying and Breath, Eyes, Memory

"A deeply felt and fiercely written debut novel ... The voice Ms. Bulawayo has fashioned for [Darling] is utterly distinctive - by turns unsparing and lyrical, unsentimental and poetic, spiky and meditative." --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times