Ten-year-old Darling has a choice: it's down, or out

"NoViolet Bulawayo has created a world that lives and breathes - and fights, kicks, screams and scratches, too. She has clothed it in words and given it a voice at once dissonant and melodic, utterly distinct" Aminatta Forna "shatteringly good" Anne Tyler, Good Housekeeping "an exquisite and powerful first novel, filled with an equal measure of beauty and horror and laughter and pain" Edwidge Danticat "NoViolet Bulawayo is a powerful, authentic, nihilistic voice - feral, feisty, funny - from the new Zimbabwean generation that has inherited Robert Mugabe's dystopia" Peter Godwin, author of When a Crocodile Eats the Sun

NOVIOLET BULAWAYO was born in Tsholotsho a year after Zimbabwe's independence from British colonial rule. When she was eighteen, she moved to Kalamazoo, Michi-gan. In 2011 she won the Caine Prize for African Writing; in 2009 she was shortlisted for the South Africa PEN Studzinsi Award, judged by JM Coetzee. Her work has appeared in magazines and 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 in California.