Anna is at a crossroads in her life. She has separated from her husband and is pondering divorce. Her mother has recently died. Anna worries about her daughter but Rose is grown and mostly independent. When going through her mother’s things, Anna finds a diary that belonged to the father she never knew. Though raised with her mother’s white Welsh family, Anna’s father was a student in London, who returned to his African home without knowing she ever existed. Anna learns about his involvement with radical politics in 1970s London and begins to be curious about this missing part of her heritage.
Reading his diary of his time in London brings him to life in a new way but as she learns more about this man, it becomes clear that their relationship will not be straightforward. Anna takes the plunge and makes the trip to Bamana in West Africa, a country newly formed out of a colonized territory, where her father has played a key role in politics for the past thirty or so years.
This is such an interesting story because at the outset Anna seems entirely ordinary. She could be any suburban, middle-aged woman. Smart and thoughtful, she gave up a career in architecture to marry and raise her daughter. She’s been devoted to her family ever since but now with her daughter grown and separated from her husband, she is attempting to relearn who she is. Anna had a close relationship with her mother and her mother’s family but has always felt like an outsider as a mixed-race child. Her mother would never fully address the fact that Anna was different and all her life she has been reminded of this external differences.
Travelling to West Africa and her father’s homeland, Anna finds herself another type of outsider as she is clearly a foreigner to Bamana. There is too the question of cultural differences, even the idea of what might be right or wrong. But she also begins to find a familial connection that she has been searching for.
I really enjoyed listening to this story and it felt like a very honest and thoughtful portrayal of what it might be like to be a mixed-race woman of this time and place. While I can’t speak to that experience, it felt like Onuzo was consistently true to who Anna was as a character. As the story progressed, Anna began to increasingly make choices that I felt were dangerous, entirely different from what I might have done in her place. But I also could understand why she was making them. The shifts in her thought process were subtle but consistent and seemed to make sense.
Sara Powell’s narration in this audio version was great. I particularly appreciated the accents she provided to the various characters – from Anna herself, to a professor in Edinburgh, to the African accents in Bamana. It added a nice audio tag of recognizing the differences in these characters backgrounds and I felt like it added a lot to my understanding of the story.
Karissa Reads Books 
I loved Onuzo’s Welcome to Lagos when I read it a few years ago, and I’ve got this one sitting on my shelves waiting to be read. I didn’t get on with it when I first tried it, but I held onto it because I suspected it might just not be the right time. You have inspired me to give it another try!
This was my introduction! I actually had a physical ARC but never got on with it. The audio version worked really well for me.
I’m trying to get back to doing book reviews, so seeing all of you doing them encourages me. I followed you
It can be a bit daunting but very rewarding! Thanks for the follow!
I have a cousin who was with a man from Africa here as a student and got pregnant. I think he went back to Africa, and I’ve always wondered how her daughter feels in a white family. Then again, I also feel like people are becoming more relaxed around mixed-race families, too, because they’re more accepting in general.
That sounds a lot like this book. The main character is a visible minority in her family and community and her family kind of refuses to acknowledge that she has this different experience of the world from them. It makes a lot of sense that she would then seek out her father and a different country. I do think mixed-race families are more common than they were in previous generations, at least in the Western world.
I love the idea of the narrator doing the different voices, as I think that would help the fiction really come to life on audio. I personally have never listened to fiction on audio, because I’m worried I wouldn’t pay close enough attention, as I’m usually doing other things while listening (stretching before bed, or driving usually) but maybe I’m not giving myself enough credit haha
It really makes a difference in a story like this! I actually find a lot of fiction easier to pay attention to than non-fiction when it comes to audio. But it does have to be the right kind of fiction!
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