At the age of 32, an African author from Zimbabwe who called herself NoViolet Bulawayo electrified the literary world with her debut novel. “We need new names” starts out as a story about growing up in a ruined country, recognizable as the former British colony of Rhodesia under the dictator’s never-ending dictatorship Robert Mugabe, and then about the difficult settling in of a young African woman in America. The special feature: Our guarantee voice is the child’s mouth. The narrator is a ten-year-old girl, a street kid who describes the misery of his country with cheeky wit, impertinence and wild humor and later his country of exile USA with sober sarcasm.
