Lesley Nneka Arimah

The Future Looks Good -- War Stories -- Wild -- Second Chances -- Windfalls -- Who Will Greet You at Home -- Buchi's Girls -- What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky -- Glory -- What Is a Volcano? -- Redemption

What it Means when a Man Falls from the Sky

Lindy

Volume highlights: "Wild," "Who Will Greet You at Home," and "Redemption"

JoAnna

4.5 but rounding up—Lesley truly shines in her longer work & I would've loved to see more of it.

It's been a long time since I read a book so fast! Sometimes short story collections can feel tedious to read, but every story here earned their place in this book. Lesley's stories are heart-warming, heart-wrenching, & mechanically interesting. Her use of first vs. third person always feels intentional, and between them the narrative voices feel particularly distinct. Her hooks are bold enough to turn heads. I love how much she debunks the traditional advice to show vs. tell; in many of her stories, the story is propelled forward with telling, but in inventive ways that maintain tension and velocity. I'll definitely be rereading some of these in the future to look more closely at their structures.

Celeste Richardson

What the heck did I just read?! This was just about the strangest story I've ever ingested, but it was a powerful, beautiful strange. It was only 15 pages long, but the author said all she needed to say in those 15 pages. Gorgeous and deep. Consider my thoughts provoked.

Melody Izard

Some of these are just OK. But the one's that are good are mesmerizing.

Oluwapelumi Alo 

Naomi

Sally Lu

Keely Calagos

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.

Stories

What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky

Lizelle G

Kyle Curry

Joyce Gu

Boothby

Angie Lee

Cat Josephson

Dipo Apelehin

Bailley Leppert

Shan

Joycelyn Ghansah

Shona Tiger

Maddie

A stunning collection of short stories from Caine-Prize shortlisted and Commonwealth Writer's Prize winner Lesley Nneka Arimah, WHAT IT MEANS WHEN A MAN FALLS FROM THE SKY has been described as 'luminous' (Roxane Gay) 'mesmerising' (Ayobami Adebayo) and 'hilarious and heartbreaking' (Rowan Hisayo Buchanan). Shot through with magic and a powerful sense of yearning, this is a diverse and dazzling collection that showcases the work of a major new talent at the beginning of a stellar literary career. 'When Enebeli Okwara sent his girl out in the world, he did not know what the world did to daughters'. The daughters, wives and mothers in Lesley Nneka Arimah's remarkable debut collection find themselves in extraordinary situations: a woman whose mother's ghost appears to have stepped out of a family snapshot, another who, exhausted by childlessness, resorts to fashioning a charmed infant out of human hair, a 'grief worker' with a miraculous ability to remove emotional pain - at a price. What unites them is the toughness of the world they inhabit, a world where the future is uncertain, opportunities are scant, and fortunes change quicker than the flick of a switch. Characterised by their vividness, immediacy and the author's seemingly endless ability to conjure worlds at once familiar and unsettlingly different, this is 'a remarkable debut from a writer I'm sure we'll be reading for years to come' (Aimee Bender).

What it Means when a Man Falls from the Sky

Reviews