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Summary
Summary
A PBS NewsHour/ New York Times Book Club Pick
A NATIONAL BOOK FOUNDATION "5 UNDER 35" HONOREE
WINNER OF THE 2017 KIRKUS PRIZE
WINNER OF THE NYPL'S YOUNG LIONS FICTION AWARD
FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE LEONARD PRIZE
SHORTLISTED FOR THE ASPEN WORDS LITERARY PRIZE
A dazzlingly accomplished debut collection explores the ties that bind parents and children, husbands and wives, lovers and friends to one another and to the places they call home.
In "Who Will Greet You at Home," a National Magazine Award finalist for The New Yorker , A woman desperate for a child weaves one out of hair, with unsettling results. In "Wild," a disastrous night out shifts a teenager and her Nigerian cousin onto uneasy common ground. In "The Future Looks Good," three generations of women are haunted by the ghosts of war, while in "Light," a father struggles to protect and empower the daughter he loves. And in the title story, in a world ravaged by flood and riven by class, experts have discovered how to "fix the equation of a person" - with rippling, unforeseen repercussions.
Evocative, playful, subversive, and incredibly human, What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky heralds the arrival of a prodigious talent with a remarkable career ahead of her.
Author Notes
Lesley Nneka Arimah was born in the UK and grew up in Nigeria and the United States. Her work has received grants and awards from Commonwealth Writers, the Elizabeth George Foundation, The MacDowell Colony, Breadloaf and others. She was selected for the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 and is the recipient of an O'Henry Award. Her debut collection, What it Means When a Man Falls from the Sky, won the Kirkus Prize and the New York Public Library Young Lions Award, and was a finalist for the Aspen Words Literary Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Leonard Prize . She currently lives in Minneapolis.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In her powerful and incisive debut collection, Arimah shuttles between continents and realities to deliver 12 stories of loss, hope, violence, and family relationships. In "Wild," a reckless teenage girl is sent from America to her aunt in Nigeria, only to get caught up in the life of her equally reckless cousin. "Second Chances" sees a deceased mother magically reappear in her family's life, with mixed results, and "Buchi's Girls" is about a widow struggling to raise two daughters while living in her sister's house. Mother and daughter grifters deal with an unexpected pregnancy in "Windfalls," while the collection's futuristic title story explores a world in which mathematicians have unlocked the secrets to all humanity, allowing humans to remove emotional pain from others and disrupt the laws of nature. Arimah gracefully inserts moments of levity into each tale and creates complex characters who are easy to both admire and despise. From the chilling opening story, "The Future Looks Good," structured like a Russian nesting doll, to the closing story, "Redemption," this collection electrifies. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Nigeria serves as a prism refracting the myriad experiences of both former and current inhabitants.In two different stories in Arimah's debut collection, characters have the supernatural ability to drain emotions from other people, for good or for ill. In "Who Will Greet You at Home," a Nigerian woman participates in a tradition of making children out of inanimate materials and having them blessed by older women in hopes that they will become real. But these blessings come at a pricein her case, "Mama" blesses the child in exchange for the protagonist's own joy, "siphoned a bit, just a daba little bit of her life for her child's life." In the title story, figures known as Mathematicians are able to use precise algorithms and equations to relieve negative emotions from customers who can afford it. This power over feelings is as good a metaphor as any for storytelling. And Arimah has skill in abundance: the stories here are solid and impeccably crafted and strike at the heart of the most complicated of human relationships. Against a backdrop of grief for dead parents or angst over a lover, Arimah uses Nigeria as her muse. The characters exist in relation to a Nigeria of the pastthe ghost of the Nigerian civil war, especially, looms over many of the storiesas well as present-day Nigeria, either as citizens or expats. Arimah even imagines a future Nigeria in which it has become the "Biafra-Britannia Alliance" in a massive geopolitical shift resulting from devastating climate change. This speculative turn joins everything from fabulism to folk tale as Arimah confidently tests out all the tools in her kit while also managing to create a wholly cohesive and original collection. Heralds a new voice with certain staying power. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Arimah, a young writer of the UK, Nigeria, and the U.S., debuts with a slender yet mighty short story collection that delivers one head-snapping smack after another. Arimah's potently concentrated portrayals of young women who can't stop themselves from doing the wrong thing, especially by refusing to adhere to traditional Nigerian expectations for females to be obedient and self-sacrificing, possess tremendous psychological and social depth and resonance. Like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, she writes with subtlety and poignancy about the struggles of love and hope between daughters and mothers and fathers, including relationships complicated by the legacy of the Biafran War, class divides, and transatlantic separations, as in Wild, in which an in-trouble American teen is sent to live with her aunt in Lagos. Arimah's emotional and cultural precision and authenticity undergird her most imaginative leaps. She flirts with horror fiction, presents a ghost story, and creates an arresting form of magic realism in sync with that of Shirley Jackson, George Saunders, and Colson Whitehead. Babies are made of yarn, hair, and mud. In the title story, Mathematicians devote themselves to calculating and subtracting emotions, drawing them from living bodies like poison from a wound. Arimah's stories of loss, grief, shame, fury, and love are stingingly fresh and complexly affecting.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THIS FIGHT IS OUR FIGHT: The Battle to Save America's Middle Class, by Elizabeth Warren. (Metropolitan/Holt, $28.) In this smart, tough-minded manifesto, the Massachusetts senator rails against income inequality and its consequences and discusses how it can be reduced through public policy. LAST HOPE ISLAND: Britain, Occupied Europe, and the Brotherhood That Helped Turn the Tide of War, by Lynne Olson. (Random House, $30.) Olson, in her fourth book about World War II, argues that the people of occupied Europe and the expatriate leaders did far more for their own liberation than historians have realized. WHAT IT MEANS WHEN A MAN FALLS FROM THE SKY, by Lesley Nneka Arimah. (Riverhead, $26.) Originality and narrative verve characterize the stories in this first collection by a British-Nigerian-American writer. A witty and mischievous storyteller, Arimah is especially interested in the cruelty and losses brought about by clashes between women, especially girls. DEMOCRACY: Stories From the Long Road to Freedom,by Condoleezza Rice. (Twelve, $35.) The promotion of democracy should shape America's foreign policy in the 21st century, the former secretary of state writes in this important new book, even though she recognizes that it's "really, really hard." BETWEEN THEM: Remembering My Parents, by Richard Ford. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $25.99.) In two discrete sections written 30 years apart, Ford describes his parents' lives and deaths by turn, driven by his curiosity about who they were. This slim beauty of a memoir is a remarkable story about two unremarkable people. BORNE, by JeffVanderMeer. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) A climate change survivor in a post-apocalyptic city in a sea of toxicity tries to adopt a nonhuman life-form capable of changing and learning. Her companion, along with a defunct (probably) biotech company and a flying bear, also make appearances. This coming-of-age story signifies that eco-fiction has come of age. FEAR CITY: New York's Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics, by Kim Phillips-Fein. (Metropolitan/Holt, $32.) Phillips-Fein narrates the story of New York City's fiscal crisis of the 1970s with fresh eyes, suggesting that the transformation into two cities it set in motion was not an inexorable evolution but a political choice. STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND: Searching for Gershom Scholem and Jerusalem, by George Prochnik. (Other Press, $27.95.)When he embraced Jewish tradition as a source of meaning, Prochnik sought out Scholem, a scholar who introduced the kabbalah to secular society. NOTES OF A CROCODILE, by Qiu Miaojin. Translated by Bonnie Huie. (New York Review Books, $27.95.) First published in 1994, this cult classic novel depicts a group of quick-witted and queer friends, students at a university in Taipei, and an obsessive love. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books
Library Journal Review
Arimah's debut collection comprises a dozen surprising, affecting stories. Narrator Adjoa Andoh sublimely intensifies the author's already breathtaking prose into an irresistible, spectacular performance, as she effortlessly modulates her distinctive voice, picking up genders and generations, cadences and accents, and just as easily discards such details for the next scene, the next story. Andoh is both innocent and knowing in "Wild," about two teenage cousins-one American, the other Nigerian-forced to spend a summer together. She grows determined in "Light," about a family splintered by opportunity and distance. She growls through "Who Will Greet You at Home," about motherless women making phantom babies. She navigates both desperation and entitlement in "What Is a Volcano" between feuding, less-than-equal gods. Resignation drives "Windfalls," about an untethered mother and daughter trying to survive. Detachment goes awry in the titular story as a mathematician attempts to alchemize humanity into numbers. VERDICT Libraries with patrons especially partial to magnificent, international discoveries will want to provide Sky in multiple formats. ["Each story, tightly crafted and unique, will etch into your memory": LJ 5/1/17 starred review of the Riverhead hc.]-Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
The Future Looks Good | p. 1 |
War Stories | p. 9 |
Wild | p. 23 |
Light | p. 55 |
Second Chances | p. 65 |
Windfalls | p. 79 |
Who Will Greet You at Home | p. 93 |
Buchi's Girls | p. 123 |
What it Means When a Man Falls From the Sky | p. 151 |
Glory | p. 175 |
What is a Volcano? | p. 201 |
Redemption | p. 213 |