48 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ■ APRIL 6, 2020
I
t wasn’t easy to pin down an interview with Imbolo Mbue,
the 39-year-old novelist whose first book, 2016’s Behold the
Dreamers—a dissection of capitalism, class, and the
American dream set during the Great Recession—went on
to become a New York Times bestseller, an Oprah Book Club
pick, and the winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. But
the scheduling challenges weren’t any person’s fault. On March 12,
in an attempt to curb the spread of the new coronavirus, Mayor Bill
de Blasio declared a state of emergency for New York City, where
Mbue lives with her husband and children. So, instead of meeting
in person, she answered questions via Skype from her Midtown
apartment, casually dressed in a denim shirt, her hair up in a bun,
during a brief break from figuring out what exactly one does during
a pandemic.
In a way, there was something appropriate about the timing.
Mbue’s latest novel, How Beautiful We Were (Random House, July),
follows the residents of Kosawa, a fictional African village that’s
been devastated over the course of several generations by a greedy
American oil company and the
corrupt national government. The
village children are dying from
contaminated drinking water and
the land can no longer produce
medicinal herbs. Finally, the vil-
lagers determine that no one will
help them—they’ll have to fight
back. Among them is a child named
Thula, who goes on to lead a move-
ment aimed at bringing democracy
to her people and a redemption of
their ancestral land.
It’s an epic work tackling a
number of brutal realities: the
question of whether we protect
ourselves or the greater community,
how anger manifests in those who
have been exploited for others’ gain
(and further entrenches those deter-
mined to stay in power), and how a
willful ignorance of the ways we are
inextricably tied together threatens
to destroy us all.
“We are so connected, and I think
that, for better or worse, my novel
deals with globalization,” Mbue
says. “We are seeing the perils of
globalization right now. People pay
prices for other people’s actions in
other parts of the world.”
Growing up in the coastal townImbolo Mbue’s sophomore novel
examines the effects of globalization
on a fictional African village
BY JEN DOLL
© kiriko sano