What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky

What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky (2017) is a prize-winning debut collection of twelve short stories by the Nigerian-born writer Lesley Nneka Arimah. Ranging from sharp realism to fable and speculative science fiction, the stories are linked by their fierce focus on women and girls, on mothers and daughters, and on the pressures of family, culture and migration in Nigeria and its diaspora. For Cambridge IGCSE the whole collection is the set text.

Range and setting

The stories move between Nigeria (often Igbo families and contemporary Lagos or the south-east) and the United States, between the realistic and the fantastical. Some are grounded domestic dramas; others, like the title story, imagine speculative futures, or, like 'What Is a Volcano?', take the form of myth. This variety of form and place is part of the collection's distinctiveness.

Recurring concerns

Across the twelve stories Arimah returns again and again to mothers and daughters, to the burdens placed on women and girls, to grief, family duty and inheritance, and to the experience of Nigerians at home and abroad. The famous 'Who Will Greet You at Home', in which women make babies out of materials, and the title story, in which 'Mathematicians' remove people's grief, push these concerns into the speculative, while stories such as 'Light' and 'Windfalls' explore them through realism.

Why it matters for the exam

For Cambridge IGCSE you must analyse how Arimah creates meaning across the collection: her blending of realism, fable and speculative fiction, her precise and often dark style, and her exploration of womanhood, motherhood, grief and migration. This guide gives you a story-by-story account, key characters, collection-wide themes, context, style, key passages, a quotation bank and full essay practice, with quotations grounded in the text.