A slow start, but enjoyable read with interesting characters and a compelling plot.

3.5* rounded down to 3.

Thanks to NetGalley, Onuzo and Little, Brown Book Group UK for an eArc in exchange for an honest review

Thank you Chibundu, a well written book weaving the reality of the west and African identity. You nailed it at the end with the rite of passage or should I say initiation. Cleverly written.

The conceit of Sankofa is very unique-what would you do if you discovered that your long-lost father is a feared dictator? Anna discovers that her father, who had abandoned her, and her mother before she was born, has left his diary behind. All she knew about him was what her mother had told her-that Anna was born when her mother ( who's a white Britisher) had a fling with a student from Africa, a lodger at her parental home. Her father apparently left one day, never to return, and Anna thinks he doesn't know of her existence. Anna's mother's death leads to her finding out why her mother did not tell her any more, and facing a bit of an existential crisis with her nearly 2 decade old marriage ending, and empty nest syndrome, Anna decides to try to find her father. What follows is a nuanced exploration of colonialism, the difficulties of governing, the resource curse that seems to afflict all resource-rich countries, and the lure of absolute power. Onuzo's research is impeccable, with Anna's father, Kofi Adjie, exhibiting the cruelty and excesses of both Mobuto and Idi Amin ( Adjie's palace/amusement park/zoo in Gbadolite, stories of him feeding his enemies to crocodiles). Onuzo gives you Adjie's perspective as well, on his abuses of power and though he's self-aware, he's not repentant at all. There's a very funny character, a consultant, who lists, with apparently no irony at all, all the resources the fictional country possesses that he's helped exploit, and ends with newly discovered deposits of oil! Hilarious, if wince-inducingly on-the-nose take on the relationship capitalists have had with newly independent, resource-rich countries. There are some beautifully written chapters, where Anna tries to come to terms with the effect her father had on the country-instrumental in their freedom struggle, also instrumental in turning into a dictatorship. Onuzo doesn't hesitate to elide the full import of his megalomania and cruelty, even to Anna herself.
When I finished the book, I was quite dissatisfied with the ending, where it felt that Anna was leaving a dependant relationship with one narcissistic man , to get into a similar situation with another, and seems to absolve him very easily off all his crimes. When I thought about it, though, it seems a very human reaction to want to benefit from power and I don't think most of us have the moral rectitude to deny ourselves that. It's not how it's framed in the book, but I choose to read it that way!
The book could do with a bit of ending, the consultant character I've mentioned before gets way too many pages, while I would have liked more of Anna's interactions with her half-siblings. It's still an excellently executed conceit, and a fascinating thought experiment!

Thanks to NetGalley and The Publisher for this eARC in exchange for an honest review.

3.5 stars rounded down.

I enjoyed reading this book. I would recommend it to anyone. I thought the writing was excellent and I really believed I was reading the words of a middle aged women. Having read Onuzo previous books I can really see how great she is at her craft and how she is developing as a writer. I like the fact that she chose complex characters - the father that is both gentle and loving but also brutal and ambitious. And the meek daughter finally finding her strength and power while finding herself. I like that she compares how the different classes live in different cultures. I liked many things about this book, but didn't get emotionally invested with it, hence my rating.

Following the death of her mother, Anna Bain discovers a diary amongst her possessions. The diary was written by Francis Aggrey, Anna’s father, who Anna has never met. As Anna reads on, she begins to feel a connection to her father, and looks to discover more information about him. And then she finds that Francis Aggrey is now Kofi Adjei, the former president of the (fictional) African country of Bamana.

This book takes a look at race and identity in a very engaging way, especially considering how sad Anna’s story is. Her mum has passed away, Auntie Caryl has dementia, her daughter Rose has an eating disorder and she’s going through a divorce. The only hope she’s clinging onto is the thought of her father. But even that’s not straightforward- she’s never met him before and it seems he may be a dictator!
It was awful to consider how Anna, as a biracial person, was treated in both Wales, where she grew up, and in West Africa, where her father is from; belonging to both countries but not quite fitting into either.

There were some plot points which didn’t sit well - more loose ends that weren’t tied up or didn’t lead anywhere, but overall I got into this story very, very quickly and enjoyed it a lot. I’d love to read more from this author.

Thank you to NetGalley and Virago for the advance review copy.

Dear Publisher

Thank you for sharing your creation with me. I have uploaded a video review and will be posting textual ones soon on all platforms. This has been solely my pleasure!

Chibundu Onuzo is an author of great promise and I can't wait to read her first two novels.

This is a 4.5 stars read for me. Absolutely adored it!

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A lovely story of identity, family and hope. Anna travels to Bamama in West Africa after finding her fathers diary. She didn’t know him well growing up, so this is a chance to find out more about both him and herself. A beautiful read, I loved the vivid descriptions and the characters. A great read.

Sankofa is a compelling, surprising and profound story of a mixed-race British woman who goes in search of the West African father she never knew, by award-winning author Chibundu Onuzo. Anna is the daughter of a white Welsh mother and a black father and is at the stage of her life when she's beginning to wonder who she really is. She has separated from her husband, her daughter is all grown up, and her mother--the only parent who raised her--died several months ago. Searching through her mother's belongings one day, Anna finds clues about the African father she never knew. His student diaries chronicle his involvement in radical politics in 1970s London but her mother never told her much about him apart from his name - Francis Aggrey.

Through these journals she builds a picture of him in her head. He charts his time with Anna’s mother, the racism he was subjected to and the friends he made while in England. She learns that he helped liberate his home country from colonialists, but Anna later discovers, much to her disappointment, that he eventually became the president--some would say dictator--of a small nation in West Africa called Bamana. And he is still alive. When Anna decides to track her father down, a journey begins that is disarmingly moving, funny and fascinating but she very quickly realises her views are seen perceived as those of a white westerner and an outsider and she is viewed with suspicion.

The narrative raises universal questions of race and belonging, the overseas experience for the African diaspora, and the search for a family's hidden roots. Masterful in its examination of freedom, prejudice, and personal and public inheritance, Sankofa is a story for anyone who has ever gone looking for a clear identity or home and found something more complex in its place. Anna’s search is captivating and her search for identity is one we will all go on at some point in our lives. As much as being a personal journey, though, this is a dissection of colonialism, racism, culture and poverty, and Onuzo has done a superb job of weaving these aspects together and capturing the essence of a people and a place. Highly recommended.

Sankofa is a simple, beautifully written book so compelling that I read it all in one day. It's the story of Anna Bain a mixed-race British woman who at 48 years old, following her mothers' death, discovers that her father, Francis Aggrey, a man she never knew is alive and living in Bamana in West Africa.

She gets a glimpse of who Francis was by reading the diaries he left with her mother before he left England for Africa and feels an affinity with him through the pages of his decades-old journals. With her marriage on the rocks and her daughter old enough to live her own life, Anna decides to travel to Bamana on her own and meet the father she never got the chance to know. The man she finds when she arrives seems very different to the somewhat naive Francis of his diaries but the more she gets to know him, the more Anna understands that identity can be complex and multi-faceted.

Although Bamana and its capital Segu are fictional places in the context of the novel, their names have links to real cities or past empires in Africa. I thought this choice was really clever as it allows Onuzo to maintain a level of authenticity without being bound by the need to stick to historical facts. References to traditions, foods and local dialect all have roots in West African culture which roots the story in reality in a way that may not have happened had Onuzo chosen to create a completely new, fictional language or set of traditions.

Anna who was always aware of her blackness in Britain is surprised to find herself categorised as white when she lands in Bamana, her pale skin standing out as foreign in a land where the majority of people are dark skinned. It's not just her skin colour or hair texture that makes her stand out, it's the assumptions and presumptions she unconsciously holds about Africa from living in the West and consuming its version of history.

I thought Onuzo deftly used Anna's mixed-race identity to explore issues around race and the legacy of colonialism in a way that didn't feel preachy or shoe-horned in to make a point. While, it's perfectly possible to read Sankofa as a straightforward story of a woman looking to connect with a father she never knew, for those willing to dig a little deeper there is a lot more to this tale. Onuzo addresses issues of power, corruption, racism, colourism, father-daughter relationships, sibling relationships, tradition, eating disorders and infidelity in a nuanced way that will encourage you to go away and do your own research or simply assess your own biases.

Prior to reading Sankofa, I had read The Spider King's Daughter by the same author and can see in this, Onuzo's third book, just how much skill she has already gained as a writer. Her writing style in Sankofa is more assured and impactful as much for what she does say as what she leaves unsaid. I would highly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in stories about family and/or race. I look forward to seeing what Onuzo will go on to write as she goes from strength to strength as an author.

Thank you, Virago, for providing access to this book. It's my first time reading Chibundu and I wasn't expecting anything but this book is very fast-paced I was able to get into the story very quickly.

Reading it as a Nigerian, I felt like there were a lot of inconsistencies that were distracting me from the plot. Also, I did not like the voice of the protagonist, for someone who is almost 50 years old, she sounded like a teenager and I don't know maybe because of the issues she has with her dad but I didn't like her voice.

Overall, it's an okay book.

I adored this book. The style of writing is so feeling and also detached at times in its own way too. It fits perfectly with the journey Anna goes on. I love that the characters are complex and imperfect and the contrast of her life and experiences in both England and Bamana. I could have read another 200 pages quite happily and I’ll be thinking about this book for a while.

Sankofa is centred around Anna Bain, born of an 1960s affair between a young Welsh woman in London and Francis Aggrey a student from the (semi-fictional - see below) West African country of Bamana. Growing up, she never knew her father, and he knew nothing of her existence.

We follow Anna in her 50s, where the death of her mother and separation from her husband leave Anna facing something of a mid-life crisis. The discovery of a long-lost diary kindles her interest in her father, and Anna decides to seek him out. She quickly finds out that Francis had gone on to become a independence fighter, prisoner and then President of Bamana. Along the way he dropped his Anglicised name and became Kofi Adjei. And according to many, became a brutal dictator, though the reality may be more complicated.

The story gives the author, Chibundu Onuzo, space to raise a lot of issues - race and racism in 1960s' London and more recently, personal change, white saviourism, colonial violence, governance and politics in post-colonial Africa. These are all explored with admirable subtlety and insight, with no glib conclusions offered, and without weighing down the story in dense philosophical debates. We're _shown_ the issues, not preached to, either by the author or any of the protagonists.

The prose is clear and engaging, the characters well-rounded and real, the plot believable and interesting. The result is a fascinating tale, and wonderful book.

One final point worth mentioning is the intriguing decisions Onuzo makes when it comes to fictionalising the locations. Bamana is not a real country, but it was an empire in past centuries, in part of what is now Mali. The real Empire's capital was the city of Segou, the fictional country's is Segu. Other details are changed, however: in the book, Bamana is a coastal nation, and a former British colony, neither or which applies to 18th-19th century Bamana. The names are drawn from a wide African pool, though with a particular Ghanaian flavour. The real-world city of Gbadolite, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, appears in the novel within Bamana, as Adjei's playground rather than Mobuto's. There are also similarly intriguing nods to classics of African literature - Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease. I did not manage to unpick any alternative meanings in this, though there may well be symbolism and allusions that eluded me. If nothing else, however, it helped create a plausibility and reality in the fiction that worked very well.

Sankofa is a novel about finding who you are and parent-child relationships, as a mixed-race British woman tracks down the African father she never knew. Anna grew up knowing very little about her black father, but her white mother never quite knowing what to do with her mixed-race daughter. Separated from her husband and with her mother recently passed away, Anna finds a diary written by her father when he was in London, detailing his involvement in radical politics, and then discovers that subsequently he became the president of a country in West Africa. She's inspired to track him down and trace the side of her family she never knew, but she discovers a life very different to her own.

This is an easy to read and gripping novel about a middle-aged woman looking for her father and also searching for purpose now her own daughter is grown up and she is separated from her husband. The narrative weaves together various elements of Anna's life and she's a fascinating character, someone dwelling on the past but also looking for new connections. There are a few threads or characters that seemed like they were going to go somewhere but don't, though some of these are because Anna as a character is avoiding things in her life. Underlying themes like how Anna is treated as a mixed-race person both in England and Bamana and how her mother treated her race provide interesting looks at cultural expectations and identity, combining well with the generally light story of her expected discoveries about her father.

A refreshing chance to see a middle-aged character searching for their family and heritage, Sankofa is a readable book that combines humour with a look at what it's like to be mixed-race and to have only grown up knowing one half of your family and identity.

A poignant novel exploring a complicated father-daughter relationship is ultimately weighed down by unnecessary side-characters and by a superficial approach to serious issues. While I appreciate the themes the author touches upon in Sankofa, I found this novel to lack cohesiveness. The story begins with Anna, daughter of a white Welsh mother and a Black father from a fictional country in West Africa, who is in her late forties and in the process of separating from her husband. Not only Anna is grieving her marriage but her mother, who died months previously. Anna chances upon her estranged father's old journals. Her mother revealed very little of his identity, giving Anna a name, Francis Aggrey, and not much else. Through her father's entries, Anna glimpses for the first time in her life her father's character. These journals relate his time in England, the racism he experienced, the friends he made, his politics, as well as his brief relationship with Anna's mother.
Anna is amazed to discover the role her father played in his country's liberation from colonial rule and shaken to learn that many went on to speak of his time as Bamana's Prime Minister as resembling a dictatorship. In a rather conventional way, the novel sees Anna traveling to Bamana to meet her father who is unaware of her existence.
The story is at its best when it focuses on Anna time with her now an elderly father. His entries were certainly compelling but, as Anna herself notes, some of what he does is questionable indeed. I also found that Anna's analysis of his entries detracted from the entries themselves. She would simply go on to reiterate what had just happened in the actual entry so that most of her observations came across as banal and or obvious. And why in the world did she have to keep on repeating his name and surname every time she mentioned/thought of him?
Anna's experience at Bamana had its interesting moments. For example, she quickly realizes that to the locals she is white and that her view of African countries such as Bamana betrays her Westerner gaze (she takes for granted certain things, acts rashly without considering the repercussion of her actions, and applies her anglicized views on certain events and or encounters). Although few, Anna's recollections of her childhood and her mother were also compelling. Anna's mother seemed unwilling to admit that her daughter could be treated differently because of being Black, often downplaying Anna's experiences of racism or using the 'I see no color' card.
Most of the secondary characters, with perhaps the exception of Anna's 'new' siblings, were rather one-dimensional or played bizarre roles in Anna's story. For instance, she meets this man and most of their interactions have this quality of unease, a certain something that made me think he was a danger to her, but no, his terrible attempts at flirting and creepy behavior are all of a sudden brushed away (?).
Anna's husband remains a nondescript figure while her daughter, who is in her twenties, comes across as a teenager more often than not, practically bullying her mother into divorcing her dad. The daughter has an eating disorder and this is something that is used to create tension between her and Anna. And I, for one, did not care for it. Why include this issue if you are just using it to add some 'drama'?
The most eventful part of the story happens in the last portion of the novel. Here Anna and her relationship with her father and his country come to the forefront of the story (coincidentally it is here that her daughter, husband, weirdo guy are pushed to the sidelines).
As I said, I appreciate most of the themes incorporated in this novel and the author's discussion on race, colonialism, poverty, and cultural differences. However, her characters often came across as little more than names on a page, Anna more so than her father. She was a housewife so the story addresses how that decision affected her life but still, even without a career/job one can have a personality, and Anna did not. She functions as a vehicle, someone who is there to move the story along and to make the most basic of observations. There was a lot of repetition, most of these were Anna reiterating something that has just been said (such her thinking 'Anna is an anagram of Nana' just after someone had told her that if you move the letters in Anna you get Nana and vice-versa). I also cared little for the present-tense of her narration.
Overall, this was a somewhat patchy novel and although I did not particularly care for it I would probably read something else by this author and I recommend prospective readers to check out some more positive reviews.

ARC provided by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Normally ,if I read a Nigerian author it takes me a while to get into the prose, this story was super easy to get into. I really enjoyed it for the short novel it was.

The two parts of the book, before she went to Nigeria and after were distinctly different tones in a good way. I would read another book by Onuzo.