W. W. Norton & Company toggle caption W. W. Norton & Company We Need New Stories: The Myths that Subvert Freedom, by Nesrine Malik W. W. Norton & Company "Throughout my childhood I was fed this ancestral myth that still remains fixed for many of my generation of Maliks. It is sort of a private family madness," writes Nesrine Malik in the introduction to her debut book, We Need New Stories. She's speaking of a bit of family folklore that has been passed down through her family from generation to generation: The notion that in their homeland of Sudan, a forebear owned a house that was so large, tea would grow cold while one walked from one side of it to the other. When she learned how false and fanciful this narrative was — members of her family in Khartoum were so poor that many of them slept in the yard outside their overcrowded house — she felt betrayed.