Immigration, class and unequal economic power shape both of Imbolo Mbue’s major novels. Behold the Dreamers follows Jende Jonga, a Cameroonian immigrant in New York who becomes chauffeur to a wealthy Lehman Brothers executive shortly before the financial crisis, placing the ambitions of two families on opposite sides of the same economic collapse. How Beautiful We Were shifts to the fictional African village of Kosawa, where residents confront an American oil company whose pollution has damaged their land and health. Mbue uses multiple viewpoints and family stories to show how institutions that appear distant become immediate in homes, jobs and communities. Her prose is accessible and character-led, with moral questions emerging from concrete economic pressures. Mbue sits most naturally within African diaspora fiction, migration novels and socially engaged literary fiction. Read more Less
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