Description
The Private Joys of Nnenna Maloney is a comic novel about Nnenna, a half-Nigerian teenager living in modern-day Manchester with her mother, Joanie.
As Nnenna approaches womanhood, she begins trying to connect with her Igbo-Nigerian culture. Her once-close and tender relationship with her mother becomes strained as she asks probing questions about her father, whom she's never met and whom her mother refuses to discuss.
Each chapter begins with a biblical quote that harks back to the beginning of Maurice and Joanie's relationship—meeting in a church group and a café in Cambridge—but these are really Nnenna's diary headings, which she is trying to hide from her mother's prying eyes. Nnenna asks big questions about how to 'be' when she doesn't know who she is, while Joanie wonders how to truly love when she has never been loved.
Okechukwu Nzelu brings us a novel about two women, big questions and lots of laughter in a unique and distinctive new voice.