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Glass House

ISBN 
9781485904472
Format 
Paperback
Recommended Price 
R300.00
Published 
October 2021
About the book: 
Let me tell you a story. It’s about a war. This war is not the type fought with guns and machetes. It is a family type. A silent war. The type fought in the heart. It began long before I was formed.
 
Udonwa’s family is at war – a war of relationships, played out under the tyranny of a monster dad.
 
Age twelve, Udonwa has a peculiar love of her father, Reverend Leonard Ilechukwu, who favours her but beats his wife and his other children. She sees his good side: after all, he pays the school fees in advance, and tells her that she, named ‘the peaceful child’, is the one most likely to become a doctor in the family.
 
But luck doesn’t last forever. When her newly married eldest sister suddenly takes her from their family compound in Iruama, Nigeria, to live with her in Awka, Udonwa experiences violence first-hand.
 
Later, pieces of a sinister picture emerge that shake her life to the core. No longer the person she thought she was, Udonwa launches into a period of extreme change, and parts of her life spiral into chaos as she finds herself torn between her love for her father and an underlying need to free herself.
 
This vivid family saga, set in Nigeria, is engrossing, deeply unsettling and finally uplifting.
 
Other titles by this author 
About the Author

Chinenye Emezie studied Creative Writing at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, and has a bachelor’s degree in Public Administration. Her short stories and essays have appeared in anthologies and literary journals including Africa Book Club, Kalahari Review, Book Lovers Hangout and Opinion Nigeria. Chinenye is a 2013 winner of the Africa Book Club Short Story Competition and an alumna of the Hedgebrook/Vortext Women Writers’ Workshop, Whidbey Island, usa. Her award-winning short story Glass House is recurring study material at the Centre for Theatre and Performance, department of Dramatic Arts, University of the Witwatersrand. Glass House is her first novel.

Photo credit: @mikestudios2019

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