We Need New Names

We Need New Names is the 2013 debut novel of the expatriate Zimbabwean writer NoViolet Bulawayo. It is a coming-of-age story about a young girl named Darling, first as a ten-year-old in Zimbabwe navigating a world of chaos and degradation with her friends, and later as a teenager in the Midwestern United States.

The first chapter was presented as a story in the Boston Review under the title Hitting Budapest and won the 2011 Caine Prize for African Writing, which is how the book first reached readers. The chair of the judges, Hisham Matar, said the language of that chapter crackles and that the story has moral power and weight alongside the artistry to refrain from moral commentary. The Zimbabwean chapters are set in a shantytown the children call Paradise, where the days are filled with stolen fruit and the visits of aid workers rather than with school.

The novel moves between two countries and two versions of Darling. The movement is the plot: she joins an aunt working in America and finds that the better future she expected has its own constraints, so the book's subject is displacement rather than arrival.