They are Darling, Chipo, Godknows, Bastard, Sbho and Stina, and they are leaving Paradise for Budapest "even though we are not allowed to cross Mzilikazi Road, even though Bastard is supposed to be watching his little sister Fraction, even though Mother would kill me dead if she found out," Darling narrates. "There are guavas to steal in Budapest, and right now I'd rather die for guavas."
So begins We Need New Names, the outstanding debut novel by Zimbabwean writer NoViolet Bulawayo. The opening chapter ("Hitting Budapest"), which won Bulawayo the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2011, immediately pulls the reader into 10-year-old Darling's world, where "Paradise" is Darling's shantytown in Zimbabwe, and "Budapest" is the similarly incongruous name of a nearby wealthy neighborhood.
Darling and her friends have witnessed the destruction of their homes and schools by military thugs, the desperation of poverty and the flight of their fathers to mysterious jobs abroad that they don't always come home from (or, like Darling's father, they come home from with AIDS).
Darling dreams of escape to America, where her Aunt Fostalina lives (in "Destroyedmichygen"). Eventually, she leaves but quickly learns that the U.S. isn't paradise, either: "This place doesn't look like my America," Darling says of snowy, bleak Detroit. "It's like we're in a terrible story, like we're in the crazy parts of the Bible, where God is busy punishing people for their sins and is making them miserable with all the weather."
Though this is a story of loss, yearning and alienation, Bulawayo's prose is so striking and vivid (and Darling is such a disarmingly likable narrator) that We Need New Names feels ultimately hopeful. --Hannah Calkins, blogger at Unpunished Vice