The other day I wrote about the pair of Heinemann Classics I’ve read this year. Maybe you’ve seen their quintessential orange and black and white covers. They look a little like the vintage Penguins some people collect. But mostly I’ve been reading contemporary African writers.

Sometimes, after Bill made a selection for his project, I chose another book by the same author. When he was reading Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, I borrowed Every Leaf a Hallelujah from the library instead: a short fable-like story about our relationship with the wider natural world and how we navigate (and avoid) our responsibilities as inhabitants of this planet. Mangoshi is a fantastic heroine: determined and daring.

What I remember about The Famished Road was how solidly it upset my expectations about the shape of stories and how complicated its unfamiliar cosmological view seemed to me. (A little like the new Chigozie Obioma novel The Road to the Country, which actually has a diagram outlining Nigerian cosmology, so it’s easier to understand how some of the characters fit into that worldview, their vantage point on the human characters in the novel.)

Every Leaf was nothing like that and Dangerous Love is different from both: it reminds me that reading a single book from an author’s oeuvre leaves a lot unexplored. But that doesn’t create additional reading hours in a day either: one can’t read everything.

Peace Adzo Medie’s His Only Wife was Bill’s Ghanaian choice for July: perfect timing for me, because I was in the middle of another story about a young Ghanaian-American woman trying to navigate her first serious relationship with a man: Esinam Bediako’s Blood on the Brain.

In Medie’s book, the narrator is twenty-one, recently married, and living in Accra, whereas in Bediasko’s, the narrator is twenty-four, floundering in her PhD program, and dating while attending a NYC university.

Bediako’s debut could be shelved with other Ghanaian books like Ama Ata Aidoo’s classic Changes. Or with  campus stories that center women’s experiences, like Mariko Tamaki’s (You) Set Me on Fire and Kiley Reid’s Come & Get It. Or with books like Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake and Nell Freudenberger’s The Newlyweds, Sheila Murray’s Finding Edward and some of Olive Senior’s stories in The Pain Tree, which focus on contemporary immigrants (life in North American cities, with family and traditions from India and Jamaica). Or with stories about different generations confronting questions about relationships and selfhood, like Ingrid Persaud’s Love after Love and Maxine Clair’s Rattlebone.

It would have a special place next to novels like Dinaw Mengestu’s, which consider the lives of immigrants and exiles in America (mostly Ethiopian), but which also feature characters who are seeking or missing father figures. (I really enjoyed Mengestu’s Someone Like Us in July, too.) While Bediako’s narrator is discovering how she fits into both Ghanaian and American culture, she is testing the foundations of her key relationships, and learning more about herself.

Medie’s belongs with novels like Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀’s debut Stay With Me and Lola Shoneyin’s The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives. The list of companion reads is shorter because Medie focuses exclusively on her narrator’s relationship: the novel’s themes are concise, the arc is constrained by youth and inexperience, and the story ends with a decision.

Her narrator studies fashion (but her work as a student and apprentice is overshadowed by what’s happening in her marriage). She is adjusting to city life, and observes some differences (say, between the upscale and the everyday  open-air markets) and preferences but she is preoccupied by how infrequently she sees her husband (and how frequently, comparatively, he sees his other wife and his girlfriend). And there’s no room for empathy with characters from older generations because she experiences them mostly as burdensome; the stability this marriage offers to her and her extended family is significant, but she’s overwhelmed by the cost.

In short, she’s pressured to put others’ needs before her own, and her worth resides in this marriage:

“Since my mother told me that I would be marrying Eli, I had felt as though I was balancing our two families like a basin of water, which was full to the brim, on my head. It wasn’t easy being the key to other people’s happiness, their victory, and their vindication.”

It’s essential to keep the novel solidly rooted in her perspective, so that there’s a small amount of suspense that circles around the idea of whether this marriage will be successful. She is not his first wife; she’s been introduced into the situation in hopes of altering the current dynamics. The marriage is a source of stability for her and her mother, and agreeing to it also repays a social debt to the woman who helped them after their husband/father died… but things aren’t as they seem.

How do we begin to understand the literature of other countries when most of our reading experience is rooted in the familiar, in stories with similar shapes reflecting similar concerns. When books like Taiye Salasi’s Ghana Must Go and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah reach the top of the best seller lists in North America, how much do they move the needle on our reading experience? How many more books should we read for context, to see just how remarkable it is, for instance, to have the experiences of women centred in the narratives, or to weigh how much/whether the influence of colonial cultures impact these characters’ life choices? And, when the literary output of even one of those writers can be tremendously varied, and their preoccupations changing over the course of their lifetimes, where do we start. But perhaps that’s not the best question to ask. Maybe it’s more about the decision to start.

Have you read any of these? If not, which would serve as a(nother) beginning to suit your current reading mood?