A few years ago I was listening to one of those From our Own Correspondent programmes on the BBC. A female journalist was on an assignment in Mali and had got herself completely lost. She drove up to this village the middle of nowhere and a whole crowd of teenagers spotted her and came crowding around. She noticed with a jolt that they all had Osama Bin Laden t-shirts on. With a sinking feeling, she figured that she might be in some serious trouble. They demanded to know who she was. She told them she was from the BBC. 
 "BBC! BBC!" they all started yelling and cheering. "We love America! America! BBC!" 
 This illustrates a certain two-way misunderstanding between the West and the developing countries. And also that you can't judge a person by the t-shirt they're wearing. It might be the only one they could find that morning. 
 In this novel Darling is a 10 or 11 year old girl living in Paradise, a bitterly named shantytown, in Zimbabwe, round about 2007 and 2008, when the whole country was falling apart. We don't see the big picture because we're with a bunch of kids who roam around stealing guava and playing stupid games because they don't go to school any more, school closed. So you don't get any mention of the scary hyperinflation which was a happening thing at that time. 
 Wiki : 
 Over the course of the five-year span of hyperinflation, the inflation rate fluctuated greatly. At one point, the US Ambassador to Zimbabwe predicted that it would reach 1.5 million percent. In June 2008 the annual rate of price growth was 11.2 million percent. The worst of the inflation occurred in 2008, leading to the abandonment of the currency. The peak month of hyperinflation occurred in mid-November 2008 with a rate estimated at 79,600,000,000% per month. The price of US$1 cost $Z2,621,984,228 in October 2008 
 Here's a Zimbabwean one hundred trillion dollar note - you don't see many of those things. Highly collectible now. 
 Anyway, long story short, Darling gets a lucky break - she has an aunt in Detroit who gets her into America on a visitor's visa. And of course she stays (and becomes an illegal). So from being a bittersweet celebration of how kids manage to live their own lives amongst adult cruelty and economic catastrophe the story then changes gear, very smoothly, and becomes about awkwardness - the square peg in a round hole-ness of the immigrant experience. The intense longing for home yet never wanting to go back. The love of family but the dread of them actually phoning all the time asking for money, always money. That kind of thing. I think other readers have mentioned that NoViolet Bulawayo seems intent on ticking an awful lot of issue boxes as she zips through her story - for instance, of course the daughter of the rich guy whose house Darling cleans has bulimia, and the material riches and moral emptiness of America are laid on with a bit of a trowel, it's not unfair to say; but still, this was good stuff. 
 And there's a brilliant stand-alone chapter called "How They Lived" which is a kind of sad survey of the whole immigrant experience and is one of the best things I read all year. 
 3.5 stars