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Description'To play the country-game, we have to choose a country. Everybody wants to be the U.S.A. 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 finding 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. Promotion infoTen-year-old Darling has a choice: it's down, or out AwardsShortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2013 Reviews"Darling is 10 when we first meet her, and the voice Ms. Bulawayo has fashioned for her is utterly distinctive — by turns unsparing and lyrical, unsentimental and poetic, spiky and meditative... stunning novel... remarkably talented author" - Michiko Kakutani, New York Times Author descriptionNOVIOLET BULAWAYO was born in Tsholotsho a year after Zimbabwe's independence from British colonial rule. Unlike her seven older siblings, she was born into a free country with the promise of broadened horizons. She was brought up by vibrant storytellers, including her grandmother, and quickly found a relationship between their stories and the stories she read in books. When she was eighteen, NoViolet moved to Kalamazoo, Michigan. She was surprised by the unwelcoming cold, and that life in America was not the luxurious version she had seen on TV. But she enjoyed having her own room and being able to go the mall and get fancy clothes without having to wait for Christmas. In 2011 she won the Caine Prize for African Writing and her work has also been shortlisted for the 2009 South Africa PEN Studzinsi Award (judged by J.M. Coetzee). Her work has appeared in Callaloo, the Boston Review, Newsweek and the Warwick Review, as well as in anthologies in Zimbabwe, South Africa and the UK. She earned her MFA at Cornell University, where she was also awarded a Truman Capote Fellowship, and she is currently a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. |