Club Book Episode 114 Imbolo Mbue

Cameroonian-American novelist Imbolo Mbue burst onto the literary scene in 2016 with her debut novel Behold the Dreamers. Semi-autobiographical in nature, the book tracks a young Cameroonian couple as they struggle to re-establish themselves in New York City in spite of racial barriers and the economic upheavel of the Great Recession. Lauded by The New York Times as “a dissection of the American Dream, savage and compassionate in all the right places,” Behold the Dreamers became an Oprah’s Book Club pick in 2017. Mbue’s anticipated follow-up, How Beautiful We Were, hits shelves on March 9. A heart-wrenching story about the collision of a small African village and an American oil company, How Beautiful We Were reads as a contemporary fable. In a starred review, Kirkus Reviews raves that Mbue’s masterwork “uses an ecological nightmare to frame a vivid and stirring picture of human beings asserting their value to the world – whether that world cares about them or not.”

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