Second-Class Citizen

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.

The foremother of black British women's writing . . . her early books, in particular, were powerful fictions written from and about our lives
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
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
Gripping and authentic
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
There's inspiration in her sense of injustice, in her insistence that her character's livesshouldbe better ... the ideal version of life, the one we're striving for. Emecheta never lost sight of it
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
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
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