His Only Wife

Written By Linda Malek
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His Only Wife by Peace Adzo Medie
Reviewed by Linda
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Many thanks to @oneworldpublications for sending this over to us 💖

I thoroughly enjoyed His Only Wife for its ease of reading, the level of MESS kept me entertained throughout and I was really rooting for the main character, Afi Tekpe.

Afi, a young seamstress, is thrown into marriage to the wealthy Eli Ganyo in order to better her family’s prospects. The guy doesn’t even turn up to the wedding and gets his brother to oversee matters on his behalf, which sets the precedent for the murky path ahead. For a long time we wonder when the enigma that is Eli, now Afi’s ACTUAL husband, will show up and grace us with his presence?!

The stress is palpable! I really felt for Afi who spends the first weeks of her marriage, housed in a swanky Accra apartment away from the marital home, awaiting instruction from either her helpless mother or her conniving Aunty: the conductor of this entire charade. The truth is, Eli has been forced into this union by his conniving mother to get rid of his Liberian woman and mother of his child, Muna.

There is a serious air of mystery around the other woman. As the Ganyo family feed Afi with lies upon lies about Muna and hate on her because of her darker complexion, she comes to learn the actual truth from her neighbour and prospective confidante, Evelyn.

From hereon in, we watch Afi open her eyes to the deception around her and live her best Accra life using the money and status to launch her career. But honestly, the entire Ganyo family was just horrendous. As for Eli, what a travesty! A spineless doormat.

Medie does a fantastic job of showing us the many faces of Ghanaian society, from the rural to the ultra cosmopolitan and the disparity in between. The description of elders of the family, specifically Aunties and Uncles was authentic and I absolutely loved the vibrancy of the altercations but wished there was slightly more depth to the domestic drama and definitely a little more about Muna.

Linda Malek

I've always had the urge to set up a forum and voice my thoughts after each read, but never had the confidence to do so alone. 18 months ago, I got my fellow book-loving friends involved and formed The Candid Book Club! Aside from having an exponentially growing to-read pile and deteriorating shortsightedness, we've been lucky to have been invited to publisher events and have attended several talks with our favourite authors (Thank you and long may they continue!) To take a break from the pressures of PhD Chemistry, Jess and I exchanged books all the time and in my youth, I was that kid with the first editions of Harry Potter having already read Gulliver’s travels and some Charles Dickens. At work, my desk is a library and luckily for me I sit next to another bookworm Jack who entertains all the photo-taking. I'm suffering from a chronic case of wanderlust (age-related crisis) so books which are set as far away from home as possible tend to float my boat: Middle East, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Asia...you name it. But if it's got anything to do with Egypt then I'm all over it. So you get the drift...I read all the time, everywhere (on the tube mostly), everyday, a book a week, and very quickly I'm onto the next! And then sometimes there is a book that stops me in my tracks, makes me want to swallow the pages whole, and have it next to me at all times, with some sentences staying with me forever: Shantaram by David Gregory Roberts, anything by Khaled Hosseini, The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, Stay With Me by Ayobami Adebayo (absolute gem of a woman), A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, The Good Immigrant edited by Nikesh Shuklaand and anything by Naguib Mahfouz.

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