Recommendations
Books Like The Joys of Motherhood by Buchi Emecheta
Nnu Ego invests in children who leave her to die alone
If Emecheta's bitter irony about colonial motherhood, Nnu Ego's structural trap, and the account of Lagos under British colonialism drew you in, here are eight books that extend these themes.
- 1
Buy on AmazonSecond-Class Citizen
by Buchi Emecheta
Emecheta's preceding novel — the diasporic companion; Adah's fight for independence in 1960s London against a husband who destroys her manuscript, the same feminist project in a British rather than Nigerian setting.
- 2
Buy on AmazonEfuru
by Flora Nwapa
The first novel published by an African woman — Nwapa's Igbo woman outside conventional marriage; the formal predecessor in African women's fiction that Emecheta builds on, the Igbo world from the female inside.
- 3
Buy on AmazonSo Long a Letter
by Mariama Bâ
Bâ's Senegalese epistolary feminist novel — the companion in African women's fiction; Ramatoulaye's letter about polygamy and abandonment is the West African parallel to Nnu Ego's account of colonial motherhood.
- 4
Buy on AmazonThings Fall Apart
by Chinua Achebe
Achebe's foundational Igbo novel — the male account of the same colonial transformation Emecheta depicts from the female perspective; the context for understanding the traditional Igbo world that colonialism dismantled.
- 5
Buy on AmazonNervous Conditions
by Tsitsi Dangarembga
Dangarembga's Zimbabwean feminist novel — the southern African successor in the tradition that Emecheta and Nwapa established; a young woman's account of education and constraint in colonial Zimbabwe.
- 6
Buy on AmazonPurple Hibiscus
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Adichie's debut novel — the contemporary Nigerian feminist novel that follows in Emecheta's tradition; the next generation's account of family, violence, and female survival in Nigeria after independence.
- 7
Buy on AmazonThe Color Purple
by Alice Walker
Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winner — the companion in feminist fiction's account of women's domestic suffering and the long road to self-recovery; Celie's 1930s Georgia is the African-American parallel to Nnu Ego's colonial Lagos.
- 8
Buy on AmazonHalf of a Yellow Sun
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Adichie's Biafran War novel — the contemporary Nigerian fiction that builds on the Igbo literary tradition Emecheta belongs to; women's experience of the same Lagos that is Nnu Ego's world, three decades later.
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