This Motherless Land, by Nikki May (HarperCollins, 2024, 342 pp, $30), NPR's Best Book of the Year. Review by Skye Anderson.
If a book can be fun while being engrossing, this is it!
We have two sisters: one good, one not so good, separated by a tragedy. Two countries on two continents. Their two daughters who become best friends and subsequently, also, separated by tragedy. Add a pearl necklace - or is it two, on the front cover?
We smell and taste Nigeria, we wilt in the oppressive heat, we inhale the tropics, rotting and yet beautiful. We experience having to live in a different culture but then return home - and it is the return that can be more difficult so that we never seem to fit in, in either country, on either continent, in either family.
A Sage of Time and Family
Well-written and impossible to put down, This Motherless Land is reminiscent of Persephone (about a girl growing up in revolutionary Tehran and spending her formative years alone in Europe, trying out everything) in covering two cultures but Motherless has a surprising plot within a plot followed by another.
This book will satisfy the OCD reader in that the front cover tells it all and the title is easily comprehendible. The prose is so good that you are not aware of it - the mark of a good author.
We simply loved this This Motherless Land!
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