Second-Class Citizen

Gripping and authentic

Guardian

Bold, brave, defiant ... its exploration of blackness, the white gaze, and the development of the main character Adah's sense of self is extremely powerful and continues to hold great relevance in contemporary British society

Gal-dem

Haunting . . . the trials and tribulations in Adah's personal life . . . are set against the endemic racism (and to only a slightly lesser degree, the sexism) she has to contend with in sixties London

Lucy Scholes, Paris Review

Emecheta revealed the thoughts and aspirations of her countrywomen, shaped by a patriarchal culture but stirred by the modern promise of freedom and self-definition

The New York Times

Emecheta's prose has a shimmer of originality, of English being reinvented ... issues of survival lie inherent in her material and give her tales weight

John Updike

Emecheta's women do not simply lie down and die ... always there is resistance, a challenge to fate, a need to renegotiate the terms of the uneasy peace that exists between them and accepted traditions

The Voice Literary Supplement

The foremother of black British women's writing . . . her early books, in particular, were powerful fictions written from and about our lives

Bernardine Evaristo, TLS

A harrowing immigrant story of racism and domestic violence - it shook me to the core when I first read it . . . Buchi Emecheta was a writer who struggled against all kinds of odds to produce novels that are now lodged deep in the DNA of almost every African writer

Leila Aboulela, author of The Museum

Buchi Emecheta re-ignited the rich place of women at the heart of African literature . . . without her the current strong generation of women writers, who write well and fearlessly, would not exist

Ben Okri

Fresh, timeless ... a lively work of art

John Self, Observer