Fall 2024 Common Read: "How Beautiful We Were"

Mbue’s newest novel, How Beautiful We Were, is a sweeping tale about the collision of a small African village and an American oil company. It is a masterful exploration of what happens when the reckless drive for profit, coupled with the ghost of colonialism, comes up against one community’s determination to hold on to its ancestral land and a young woman’s willingness to sacrifice everything for the sake of her people’s freedom. Mbue herself grew up in Limbe, Cameroon, a seaside town with an oil refinery. She witnessed firsthand life under a dictatorship, and was fascinated by the people who rose up against corporate greed and systems of injustice. The novel was inspired in part by this childhood fascinations, and draws heavily from historical and contemporary social and environmental justice movements as well as several current cases of environmental degradation caused by oil exploration.

National Book Award winner Sigrid Nunez calls How Beautiful We Were “a novel with the richness and power of a great contemporary fable” and Mark Salzman, award-winning author of Iron and Silk, deems it “a masterpiece.” Named one of the top 10 books of 2021 by The New York Times, the book was praised by People as “a brilliant exploration of modern colonialism and capitalism—and the fight for justice.” The New York Times called the book “sweeping and quietly devastating… How Beautiful We Were charts the ways repression, be it at the hands of a government or a corporation or a society, can turn the most basic human needs into radical and radicalizing acts. Profoundly affecting.” and USA Today concluded “This one’s going to grab you.” It is longlisted for the 2022 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.

A graduate of Rutgers and Columbia Universities, Mbue lives in New York.

For more information on Imbolo Mbue, visit her on Facebook and at www.imbolombue.com. 

Click here for more information on Kean's Common Read program.