News from Home

Starred review from May 10, 2010
Atta (Everything Good Will Come) demonstrates a fresh, vital voice in these 11 stories that move fluidly between pampered Nigerian émigrés and villagers grinding out a meager subsistence. Atta's characters are irrepressible, beginning with Makinde in "The Miracle Worker," an honest Lagotian mechanic who charges admission to view the vision his born-again Christian wife claims to have seen in a dusty windscreen in his car lot. He foolishly loses the money and is harshly humbled—to his wife's great satisfaction. The Muslim wife in the chilling "Hailstones on Zamfara"—having been married at 14, excluded from school, and now rendered near-deaf by her drunken husband's beatings—finds a short-lived sense of vindication following her husband taking another wife. Elsewhere, Atta pursues how privileged Nigerians fare abroad, such as the young graduate in "A Temporary Position," who applies his irreverence for the law to his first job, and the New Jersey nanny in "News from Home," who is torn by loyalty and her desire to practice her profession as a nurse. Atta movingly portrays these conflicted lives and gorgeously renders a wide spectrum of humanity and experience.

September 1, 2010
Nigerian-born Attas prizewinning novel, Everything Good Will Come (2006), was about a young womans coming-of-age in Lagos. Now Atta lives in the U. S., and this powerful collection is about the search for home. In the irreverent title story, a young Nigerian gets a job as a nanny for a New Jersey family; she sneers at their African decor, but what dazzles her is the mall (scented toilet paper!). When Americans ask her where shes from, she ends up saying Africa; they dont know Nigeria. As gentle as it is horrifying, Last Trip is about a courier from Lagos who boards a plane for London with a half-million dollars worth of heroin in her stomach; her commission will help care for her disabled son. In Twilight Trek, illegals are on a modern biblical exodus across the blazing Sahara desert; the wry narrator is desperate (Death I could live with), even as he confronts horrific global prejudice (foreign embassies dont grant Africans like us visas). Never messagey, the wrenching contemporary stories are universal in their appeal and impact.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)