Nigerian author Chibundu Onuzo (Welcome to Lagos) examines the ways in which one person's identities can intersect and conflict in this riveting, gracefully spare novel of self-discovery.
Biracial Anna never knew her father, only that he was an African student named Francis Aggrey who had a relationship with her Welsh mother and returned to his native country without realizing they had conceived a child. Six months after her mother's death and in the midst of a wrenching divorce, Anna finds two notebooks belonging to her father among her mother's belongings. Written in his student days, the journal entries reveal "an intelligent black man, angry, humorous," as he deals with racism, his own political awakening, and interracial romance in late 1960s Britain. Anna feels a kinship for the fiery, acerbic man in the journal, and when she runs out of journal entries, resorts to searching the Internet, with surprising results. Anna marvels "To find out at forty-eight that my father was alive and a six-hour flight away," but connecting with him won't be easy. Her father is alive but no longer Francis Aggrey. He is now Kofi Adjei, retired dictator of the small African nation of Bamana, and Anna's quest to know him will change her irrevocably.
Onuzo's astute portrait of a woman attempting to find her way to her future by mining the past mirrors the mythical creature from which the story takes its title, a bird that flies forward while looking backward. Onuzo shows that making peace with the past can be a starting point toward self-acceptance, and that imperfect families can find common ground in unexpected ways. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads