Nafkote Tamirat’s The Parking Lot Attendant

Nafkote Tamirat’s “The Parking Lot Attendant” now available

The Parking Lot Attendant by Ethiopian writer Nafkote Tamirat and published by Macmillan Publishers is now available for your reading pleasure.

Nafkote Tamirat is an Ethiopian diaspora writer who has an MFA from Columbia University. Her short stories have appeared in Birkensnake, The Anemone Sidecar, and Best Paris Stories. Her debut novel The Parking Lot Attendant is described as a mesmerizing, indelible coming-of-age story about a girl in Boston’s tightly-knit Ethiopian community who falls under the spell of a charismatic hustler out to change the world.

The blurb online about the book continues thus;

The story begins on an undisclosed island where the unnamed narrator and her father are the two newest and least liked members of a commune that has taken up residence there. Though the commune was built on utopian principles, it quickly becomes clear that life here is not as harmonious as the founders intended. After immersing us in life on the island, our young heroine takes us back to Boston to recount the events that brought her here. Though she and her father belong to a wide Ethiopian network in the city, they mostly keep to themselves, which is how her father prefers it.

This detached existence only makes Ayale’s arrival on the scene more intoxicating. The unofficial king of Boston’s Ethiopian community, Ayale is a born hustler—when he turns his attention to the narrator, she feels seen for the first time. Ostensibly a parking lot attendant, Ayale soon proves to have other projects in the works, which the narrator becomes more and more entangled in to her father’s growing dismay. By the time the scope of Ayale’s schemes—and their repercussions—become apparent, our narrator has unwittingly become complicit in something much bigger and darker than she ever imagined.

You can read an interview about the book here. You can get a copy of the book here.


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One response to “Nafkote Tamirat’s “The Parking Lot Attendant” now available”

  1. […] Kopano Matlwa’s Evening Primrose; Odafe Atogun’s Wake Me When I’m Gone; Nafkote Tamirat’s The Parking Lot Attendant; She Called Me Woman: Nigeria’s Queer Women Speak; Novuyo Rosa Tshuma’s House of Stone; Yejide […]

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