Second Class Citizen

Adah's desire to write is pitted against the forces of an egotistical and unfeeling husband and a largely indifferent white society.

In sub-Saharan Africa, property relationships around land and access to natural resources vary across localities, districts, and farming regions. These differences produce patterned variations in relationships between individuals, communities, and the state. This book captures these patterns in an analysis of structure and variation in rural land tenure regimes. In most farming areas, state authority is deeply embedded in land regimes, drawing farmers, ethnic insiders and outsiders, lineages, villages, and communities into direct and indirect relationships with political authorities at different levels of the state apparatus. The analysis shows how property institutions - institutions that define political authority and hierarchy around land - shape dynamics of great interest to scholars of politics, including the dynamics of land-related competition and conflict, territorial conflict, patron-client relations, electoral cleavage and mobilization, ethnic politics, rural rebellion, and the localization and "nationalization" of political competition.

'Sad, sonorous, occasionally hilarious, an extraordinary first novel' Washington Post 'Striking . . . brings sexism and classism into equal focus' The Paris Review Adah is a single mother of five, living in a dank, crumbling housing estate for 'problem families', avoiding the rats and rubbish. It's not quite the new start in London she had planned. As she navigates the complicated welfare system that keeps her trapped in poverty, can she cling to her dream of a better life, and find somewhere that feels like home? Buchi Emecheta's scorching debut novel drew on her own experiences to paint a moving picture of hope, unexpected friendship, and survival. In the Ditch joins The Joys of Motherhood and Second-Class Citizen in Penguin Modern Classics, with a bespoke cover design from Turner Prize-winning artist Chris Ofili. 'Buchi Emecheta was the foremother of black British women's writing' Bernardine Evaristo

The author examines whether the United Nations' severe criticisms of the UK Government's social and economic policies are valid, demonstrating that it has indeed undermined vital human rights and targeted disabled people and other minority groups.

"Adopting her niece and nephew when her half-brother is murdered in Mogadishu, Somalia, half-Somali photographer Bella disciplines her free-spirited nature and reevaluates her options when the children's mother resurfaces."-- Provided by publisher.

Exploring rites of passage in London's Asian community, this semiautobiographical novel follows a young Indo-Guyanese narrator from his South American village to Great Britain. With determination and self-discipline he seizes opportunities of education and upward mobility, but struggles to keep his cultural identity alive through memories of his childhood. This sophisticated postcolonial text links language and character to reveal the social divisions, educational obstacles, and self-exploration of a struggling foreigner in the mid-20th century.

From the British-West Indian novelist who is rapidly emerging as the bard of the African diaspora comes a haunting work about “the final passage”—the exodus of black West Indians from their impoverished islands to the uncertain opportunities of England. In her village of St. Patrick’s, Leila Preston has no prospects, a young son, and a husband, Michael, who seems to prefer the company of his mistress. So when her ailing mother travels to England for medical care, Leila decides to follow her. As Caryl Phillips follows the Prestons’ outward voyage—and their bewildered attempt to find a home in a country whose rooming houses post signs announcing “No vacancies for coloureds”—he produces a tragicomic portrait of hope and dislocation. The Final Passage is a novel rich in language, acute in its grasp of character, and unforgettable in its vision of the colonial legacy. “Like Isabel Allende and Gabriel García Márquez, Phillips writes of times so heady and chaotic and of characters so compelling that time moves as if guided by the moon and dreams.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review