The Joys of Motherhood

Nnu Ego is the daughter of a respected chief in an Igbo village, and after her first marriage fails because she cannot conceive, she is sent to colonial Lagos to marry Nnaife, a washerman she has never met. The book tracks her decades of childbearing, the eight children she raises in a single rented room, her husband's conscription into the British army during World War II, and the slow recognition that the cultural promise of motherhood as a woman's ultimate fulfillment was a lie she was sold by both tradition and colonial economics. Emecheta writes the colonial city with the same unsentimental detail she gives the village.