What It Means When A Man Falls From The Sky

'These tales cut like razors, charm like poetry, and heal like love' Tayari Jones (author of AMERICAN MARRIAGE)A stunning collection of short stories from Caine-Prize 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), 'mesmeric' (Claire Vaye Watkins) 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 'master storyteller' (Independent)

In this mesmerising and luminous collection, Arimah reimagines a world that is and imagines it as it could be, probing always at the heart of what it means to be human, This is an extraordinary short story collection exploring pain, difficult lives and wanting things which remain out of reach.... shows that talented authors don't need hundreds of pages to create rich, deeply emotional, captivating stories., Each of the tales here are tightly, complexly woven... And although so many of the characters we meet are stricken by some sort of grief - from death, displacement, disillusionment - there's no lack of emotional warmth, and even the occasional flash of dark humour. This is a collection which proves Arimah as a master storyteller, [A] playful and adventurous new talent... here is a debut writer showing serious range... the collection offers a rare combination of daring and nuance, Dazzling collection of sly, subversive stories... brilliant

Lesley Nneka Arimah was born in the UK and grew up wherever her father was stationed for work, which was sometimes Nigeria, sometimes not. She has been published in The New Yorker and Granta, her story 'Light' was winner of the 2015 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for Africa, and she has twice been shortlisted for the Caine Prize (2016 and 2017) with stories from WHAT IT MEANS WHEN A MAN FALLS FROM THE SKY.