Once Upon A Time In America

When Cameroon native Imbolo Mbue lost her job as a research manager following the crash of 2008, she began to question why she’d come to the United States in the first place. But she found purpose in writing, and now her first novel, Behold the Dreamers, is our latest Oprah’s Book Club pick.

ONE OF MY FAVORITE THINGS about naming a new book club pick is calling the writer to surprise them with the news.

In April, I called Imbolo Mbue, the 36-year-old author of Behold the Dreamers (Random House), to do just that. I’d finished reading her debut work earlier in the year and was enchanted by its freshness, its vivid language, and, most of all, the story of Jende and Neni, a couple from Central Africa who come to America believing it will grant all their wishes. As with most things in life, it’s not that simple.

My conversation with Imbolo didn’t disappoint. When I told her who I was and why I was calling, there was a lengthy silence that had me repeating “Hello? Hello?” over and over. Next came the tears—I welled up, too. Finally we talked, and Imbolo revealed something that floored me—and made me think I was fated to discover her book.

A few years after she moved to the U.S. from her coastal town—the same one Jende and Neni come from— she made a trip to a library in Falls Church, Virginia, and came upona shelf labeled oprah’s book club. Imbolo was familiar with it from watching The Oprah Winfrey Show, but she’d never read any of the authors, and she was curious. She settled on Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and later told a friend, “If God were a writer, I imagine this is how she would write.” Until then, she said, she hadn’t known what she wanted to do with her life, but that experience made her think, I want to feel the joy—the exhilaration—of writing.