Under the Udala Trees

In the 1960s, when Ijeoma is eleven, civil war reaches Nigeria and an airstrike kills her father. She is sent away from the family home in Ojoto to live with a schoolteacher.

There she meets Amina, a refugee girl from a different ethnic community. The two begin a tender love affair, until they are discovered. Ijeoma's mother, grieving and guided by a strict reading of the Bible, sets out to steer her daughter toward a conventional life.

The novel is a coming-of-age story told in the first person, moving from wartime childhood into the years that follow. As an adult, Ijeoma finds a hidden community of women like herself.

She has to weigh love and honesty against her family, her faith and a society that criminalises and condemns who she is. The book won the 2016 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction.

The question running through it is whether Ijeoma can keep both the people who raised her and the woman she is.