Second-Class Citizen

(Paperback)

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A tale of survival from one of the most beloved Nigerian writers, now in Penguin Modern Classics for the first time When Adah's dream of moving to England becomes a reality, she soon discovers that life for a young Nigerian woman living in London in the 1960s is far from what she had imagined. The cold weather and cramped, crumbling accommodation might become bearable, were it not for her tyrannical husband who abuses the power conferred on him by traditional Igbo culture and provides precious little support of any kind. As Adah finds herself providing for her rapidly growing family - rescuing her children from the hands of a slovenly childminder, learning the unspoken rules of society and negotiating everyday slights and wounding insults along the way - she takes refuge in her work as a librarian and resolves to salvage her dreams of becoming a writer. Second Class Citizen is the story of a woman's courage in the face of crushing inequalities that threaten to overwhelm her as she navigates the rigid patriarchal culture of her birth and discovers the racism at the heart of her adopted home. It also captures in vivid and moving detail, the experience of so many West African families who arrived in the UK at that time. Funny, poignant and profound, Emecheta's groundbreaking novel resonates as powerfully today as when it was first published.

Reviews

Fresh, timeless ... a lively work of art -- John Self * Observer *
The foremother of black British women's writing . . . her early books, in particular, were powerful fictions written from and about our lives -- Bernardine Evaristo * TLS *
Haunting . . . the trials and tribulations in Adah's personal life . . . are set against the endemic racism (and to only a slightly lesser degree, the sexism) she has to contend with in sixties London -- Lucy Scholes * Paris Review *
Emecheta's prose has a shimmer of originality, of English being reinvented ... issues of survival lie inherent in her material and give her tales weight * John Updike *
A harrowing immigrant story of racism and domestic violence - it shook me to the core when I first read it . . . Buchi Emecheta was a writer who struggled against all kinds of odds to produce novels that are now lodged deep in the DNA of almost every African writer -- Leila Aboulela * author of The Museum *
Gripping and authentic * Guardian *
Bold, brave, defiant ... its exploration of blackness, the white gaze, and the development of the main character Adah's sense of self is extremely powerful and continues to hold great relevance in contemporary British society * Gal-dem *
Buchi Emecheta re-ignited the rich place of women at the heart of African literature . . . without her the current strong generation of women writers, who write well and fearlessly, would not exist -- Ben Okri
Emecheta revealed the thoughts and aspirations of her countrywomen, shaped by a patriarchal culture but stirred by the modern promise of freedom and self-definition * The New York Times *
Emecheta's women do not simply lie down and die ... always there is resistance, a challenge to fate, a need to renegotiate the terms of the uneasy peace that exists between them and accepted traditions * The Voice Literary Supplement *

Author Bio

Buchi Emecheta (1944-2017) was born in Lagos, Nigeria and moved to London in 1961. A writer and academic, she wrote sixteen novels, three children's stories and numerous articles and television plays.