A book recommendation.

When I read story collections or novels I look for those intimate moments when I see, hear, and feel the characters as if I was right there in the room with them. I look for Telling details that make me remember these characters, these people, who they are, and why they’re feeling what they are feeling at particular moments. Obligation to the Wounded by Mubanga Kalimamukwento, the 2024 Drue Heinz Literature Prize winner, is full of these intimate moments, where you don’t see the camera but you feel it capturing the moment, and deliberately staying in that moment—because these moments are where it hurts the most.

I devoured this short story collection in a day. In this story collection, some stories are based in America, and some are set in Zambia, specifically in a village. In all of them, like a cloth wrapped around their shoulders, traditional familial expectations and deep-rooted tradition force characters to act. I loved getting to know these Zambian women and girls, who are living in their home country or America.

My book is full of highlights that it’s now impossible for me to lend my book to a friend. This is a habit I’m trying to quit but every time I find a good book I can’t help but pick my highlighter.

My favorite story from the collection is “Do Not Hate Me.” It has made me work hard to know what is going on in the story.

There are many things to like about this story collection:

• The startling imagery.
• The rhythm of the prose and the syntactic repetition—to empathize something, to create an emotional effect, to create meaning—makes this book a surprising and pleasurable read. It was like the sentences were singing, creating these rhythmic sounds in my ears.
• The range of themes the book explores—identity crisis, love, motherhood, the struggle of claiming a country, struggling to keep or not to keep family norms, child trafficking—subtly, without shouting at our heads, is remarkable.

I’m recommending this book to friends and colleagues. If you buy this book, read it in the order in which the stories are arranged, just like you would read a novel, beginning from the first story then the next, and so on.