Darling is luckier than the others, for she is rescued by her aunt, and goes to live with her in Detroit. Suddenly, the narrative shifts to a different trajectory, as she attempts to adjust to life in America, marvelling poignantly, for example, at the amounts of food that are available: one meal, she observes, is enough to feed two people for three days back home in Zimbabwe. Inevitably, Darling becomes Americanised, and the same girl who once prised a pair of good shoes off a dead body, now does things like going to malls, trying on dozens of clothes and leaving them in a pile in the dressing room. You then realize that NoViolet Bulawayo has played a sly trick on you: the small, flickering light of humanity and joy that burned so fiercely all through the dystopian Zimbabwean existence has now been slowly, finally, extinguished by its apparent opposite, the supposedly utopian American way of life. We Need New Names is, despite its flaws and inconsistencies, a powerful and moving novel, reminiscent, in equal parts, of Monica Ali and Zadie Smith, and of Binyavanga Wainaina’s Kenyan coming-of-age memoir, Someday I will Write About This Place. No wonder, it was a contender for this year’s Man Booker Prize.