Instead, we brush past Eli and Yaya’s final scenes so quickly that I barely felt they had time to land with Afi, let alone the readers. Part of me wishes that the Liberian woman had also been given a pov, making the novel feel less biased.

While both slightly reductive, those comparisons do give some sense of the book’s tone and superficiality.Eli is wealthy and accomplished yet he obeys his mother’s demand to marry, although he won’t extricate himself from Muna and continues to live with her. It turns out that he is in love with another woman, whom his family disapproves of; Afi is supposed to win him back on their behalf. Again, to be charitable, Afi IS quite young at 21 and also quite inexperienced, so perhaps that plays a role in her characterization and behaviour.

We encounter a world in which older women, mothers and aunts, are not setting the example but gatekeeping a system in which their daughters grow into dutiful leaches that exist only to, through the right marriage, provide a good living for the entire family. She pursues formal study to elevate her seamstress skills to become a fashion designer, mingling with the rich and powerful – networks and conveniences she obtains through her all handsome, powerful, rich husband’s family.

What was good about this was the writing- it was engaging and breezy, delightfully readable and evocative of the emotions and images the author was trying to convey. It's still a really interesting story and I loved the Ghanaian setting and domestic drama elements of it.

This “other relationship” is one of the central tensions of this story, and it is mostly described through a host of misinformation from Eli’s family, the Ganyos.This is partially due to a “debt” Afi and her mother are alleged to owe Eli Ganyo’s mother, a woman who provided shelter and work for them when they were in need. The author is I understand a well respected intellectual and a strong advocate for women’s rights; however this book lacks any literary depth in its writing (I reached the end of the book and had not highlighted any passages to include in my review) and I have to say I struggled with it as being about women’s rights (as it largely seemed to be about a girl who falls in love for little reason – other than wealth and influence – with someone she already knows to be in a relationship - and is prepared to hate another woman based entirely on the views of a family whose views she knows to be unreliable). One of the most notorious and bizarre mysteries of the Edwardian age, for readers who loved The Suspicions of Mr. The book starts off with very strong contextualisation of the circumstances that leads to a marriage between Afi and Eli, based in Ghana.