A Girl Named Disaster

A Girl Named Disaster is a novel by the American writer Nancy Farmer, published in 1996. It won a Newbery Honor in 1997 and was a finalist for the National Book Award for Young People's Literature.

Nhamo, whose name means disaster in the Shona language, is an eleven-year-old girl in a village in Mozambique around 1981. She has been raised with the customs of her people, and she has also been raised with the knowledge that she is followed by a scandal not of her making, because of what happened to her mother.

When the village decides to marry her to a man she does not want, and when an epidemic makes the place more dangerous, Nhamo leaves. What she has is a boat and a plan to reach her father's family in Zimbabwe, and what she meets on the way is the whole business of staying alive: water, food, weather, and the hours in which there is nothing to do but keep going. The novel follows her across country and river, and it treats the guidance she believes she receives from the spirits as a genuine part of how she survives.