Abi Dare

Abi Daré's first novel is carried entirely by its narrator. Adunni is fourteen, pulled out of school in a Nigerian village, married to a much older man and then sent to Lagos as a housemaid, and she tells the whole thing in an English of her own making that grows steadily more fluent as she learns. The technique is the argument. Daré was born in Lagos, came to Britain at eighteen, studied law and then project management, and wrote the book while working, partly out of a conversation with her own daughter about the people who clean other people's houses. It won a Bath Novel Award in manuscript.