Anna is the 40-something, mixed-race British woman who—while sorting through her late mother’s things—finds journals written by her father—a Black man who engaged in radical politics in 1970s London & eventually became the president/dictator of a small western African nation. She sets out to find her father and, in the process, discovers who she truly is.

Through sparse but powerful prose, Onuzo creates the portrait of a complex middle-aged woman who is searching for her identity in several spheres. The first, as a middle-aged woman in a world that assumes that with half a life lived, women are secure in their sense of self. This struggle echoes the struggles many middle-age women face that society (and fiction other than women's fiction) often neglects to parse out time to explore.

Anna's journey also focuses on her sense of self in both the family she does know and the one she doesn't. Through these experiences, the narrative touches on elements of racial identity and national identity. As a mixed-race woman, Anna is denigrated in London for being Black and in Bamana for being "obroni," or white. I loved the exploration of this juxtaposition and also how all of these identities are reconciled during the experience Anna has at the end of the novel.   

The spirit of the mythical sankofa bird means going back into the past and taking what is good and bringing it into the present to make progress in the future. It's on-point with what Anna achieves in this engrossing novel. This story starts slow and Anna is a complex mix of subdued & bold. The writing is quiet but emotional. Onuzo has taken a heightened fictional situation and explored some very real, very important challenges middle-age women face in their lives,. She's made Anna's specific in various ways (through race and nationality), yet I feel like even with that specificity there's a compelling narrative here that all readers can appreciate and enjoy.

Highly recommend!