Lesley Nneka Arimah: What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky

[bibliogramma]

Lesley Nneka Arimah Is one hell of a writer.

I first encountered her work through the short story “Who Will Greet You At Home” which was such a powerful piece of speculative fiction that I nominated it for a Hugo. It is included in her collection of short fiction, What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky, and it was irrefutably representative of the quality and power of Arimah’s work.

Arimah is a British-born Nigerian writer, and her work, which draws on both her experiences as a woman in modern Nigeria and an immigrant in colour in a white-centred country, is imbued with a deep consciousness of the realities of women’s lives in a world which can be violent and corrupt, in which they are rarely seen as they are and accorded their worth.

Her stories are primarily about people in relationships - how we are embedded in long chains of impact from the ways people interact, how they shape our lives. She writes with clarity and honesty about the ways people need, use, love and hurt each other. About the balance of desire and need, love and violence, sex and possession, in relationships between men and women. About the power and pain of the mother-daughter bond. About anger and grief and love and fear.

Arimah writes both realistic and speculation fiction, story and fable. Some of her stories have strong elements of the fantastic and the supernatural, others tell of events that are perfectly ordinary. Her themes are what remains constant, the elements varying to suit the specific story she wants to tell, the kind of experience she chooses to illuminate.

This is an amazing collection, full of depth, of truth, of inspiration, of pain, of hope, of life.