Behold the African dreamer in America

Imbolo Mbue’s rise to the top of the literary tree is a true fairy tale of New York.

The 33-year-old Cameroonian writer, who was born in a house without running water or electricity, became the talk of the town when she got a million-dollar advance for her first novel, Behold the Dreamers, in 2014.

Two years later, the book that Ms Mbue wrote at the kitchen table of her tiny New York apartment — often while breast feeding her babies — is getting the kind of reviews that authors dream of.

The New York Times called it a “dissection of the American dream that is savage and compassionate in all the right places”.

The critical reception on the other side of the Atlantic — where it was published simultaneously in French — has been equally warm, with Le Monde hailing “the discovery of a formidable writer”.

“I started the book when my first child was a baby,” Ms Mbue told AFP, “and I rewrote it while nursing my second.

“I perfected the art of holding them with one hand and writing with the other,” she laughed.

“People afterwards said, ‘How wonderful for you!’ And I said, ‘Oh, no it wasn’t. Really, you don’t understand!’” Ms Mbue’s tale of a migrant from her ocean-side hometown of Limbe who lands a job as a chauffeur for a Lehman Brothers executive — just before the bank’s collapse triggered a global financial crisis — is a bittersweet tale of great expectations slowly shattered.

Ms Mbue’s immigrant heroes take a surprisingly tender view of the follies of the privileged 1 per cent of US society they serve.