Grace

by Chika Unigwe

FROM THE WINNER OF THE NIGERIA PRIZE FOR LITERATURE

It is Baby’s birthday, but Grace has not seen her first born in twenty-six years. Now a wife, mother to twin daughters and the owner of a successful medical clinic, Grace has carefully constructed a new life. And now, the secret she’s kept for decades is about to resurface – and it could destroy everything.

Grace was only fifteen when she got pregnant and, under pressure from her parents, gave Baby away. Unable to forgive their decision, she cut them off completely. Now, when Grace’s estranged mother walks back into her life unannounced, the fragile existence she spent years building begins to unravel.

Grace is a story about motherhood, finding meaning for yourself and fighting for the people that you love.

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, Africa

256 pages, Kindle Edition

Expected publication January 15, 2026

About the author

Chika Unigwe was born in Enugu, Nigeria, and now lives in Turnhout, Belgium, with her husband and four children. She writes in English and Dutch.

In April 2014 she was selected for the Hay Festival's Africa39 list of 39 Sub-Saharan African writers aged under 40 with potential and talent to define future trends in African literature.
.
Unigwe holds a BA in English Language and Literature from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and an MA from the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. She also holds a PhD from the University of Leiden, The Netherlands, having completed a thesis entitled "In the shadow of Ala. Igbo women writing as an act of righting" in 2004.


Chika Unigwe is een dichter en schrijfster, geboren in Nigeria en wonende in België (zij beschrijft zichzelf als "Afro Belgische"). Ze schrijft in het Nederlands en in het Engels. Ze is doctor in de literatuurwetenschap aan de Universiteit Leiden (Nederland).

Reviews

[Michelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

My first book by this author and I'm now eyeing up her back list.

Set in Nigeria we meet our protagonist Grace as she sits eating a birthday cake, as she has done every year on Baby's birthday.

Grace hasn't seen Baby since she left her on a dark street the evening after she was born.

This is tackling some big issues not only in Nigerian society, but for women globally. I appreciated the insight into Nigerian culture and also into 'baby factories'.

Considering the heavy themes here, this book feels extraordinary light and short. While I enjoyed it, I would have preferred another 100 pages fleshing the characters out and adding some depth however as a novella it works.

From the reviews, I see the author is known for a heavy writing style, so I'll definitely check her other titles out.

Four stars.

[BookOfCinz · Rating 4 out of 5]

One to watch for 2026! A brilliant read!

When Grace was a teenager she got pregnant and her very strict parents made her give the Baby up, she's never recovered from it and every year since she celebrates Baby's birthday. She decides to move on from this, which meant leaving her family behind and starting fresh. Fast forward to today and Grace is doing well for herself. She's the owner of a very successful clinic that help women in many circumstances, she is a wife and mother to twin girls. Graces comes home one day and the mother she told her husband is was dead is sitting in her living room, this is the first of many things that led to the unraveling of her life.

Chika Unigwe did a brilliant job with this book. I felt so many emotions reading this, and the ending was shocking! Overall an amazing read.

[Stephanie Davy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book broke my heart slowly, while exploring what it is to be a woman and a mother in Nigeria.

I really liked the character work in this, and how it showed the ways in which people deal with pain and grief, and how it shapes our futures. It also impresses the importance of sex education for young people. And most importantly, perhaps, is that it shows with startling clarity, the pain and difficulty of growth and healing.

I never really decided if I liked Grace and honestly, it wasn’t even important. I really enjoyed getting to understand her mind and how she developed throughout the story. I was vaguely aware that in other circumstances, I’m sure I would feel strongly about her profession, but getting to really understand her and what she was trying to do made it make some sense. And a decision she made later on showed that she wasn’t a bad person.

For a short read, I felt like I went through a lot. I found the style unusual, engaging, and moving. I could feel the weight of the past bearing down on every decision made in the present.

There were a couple of twists towards the end that were really not for me and I wished I could know what happened to a certain side character instead, who had posed something of a dilemma for Grace. But nonetheless, this was a touching, thought-provoking read, and I think it would be a superb book club pick.

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Apart from the cake, she kept no other rituals. How would she begin to explain to this family she had created, the family she nurtured, the family without whom she was nothing, about the secret she buried inside her like a seed in deep soil, hoping that her own willpower would be enough to keep it from sprouting? Not a single one of them would understand. If there was anything Grace’s life had taught her, it was that love wasn’t a given. It could be taken away. Once she was no longer the person they thought they knew, their feelings too would change. It had happened before, in her previous life. She took another forkful of cake. Her cheeks bulged like a squirrel’s. The food burned her throat but Grace would not give up.

 
The author is a Nigerian-born Igbo novelist, who is now a Professor of Creative Writing in the US having studied English and Literature in Nigeria (BA), Belgium (MA) and the Netherlands (PhD) – and has had works published in both Dutch and English (as well as her Dutch to English translations of her own work) and was an International Booker Prize judge in 2017.
 
The novel opens with a memorable scene, captured in a front cover which would be otherwise dissonant with the novel, with the close third party protagonist Grace almost force feeding herself cake in secret on the birthday of “Baby” a child she was forced to abandon as a newborn at the roadside by her parents having fallen pregnant to a fellow schoolchild (from a richer family – who refused to acknowledge their son’s role) as a teenager.
 
Grace left her family as soon as she could and cut off ties with them completely (although still sending them a very generous monthly stipend) and is now married with a solid if placid husband and two more volatile teenage daughters.  She has achieved some level of fortune and fame by – to its has to be said the disquiet of her husband – using her midwivery skills, entrepreneurship and the memories of what happened to her to set up and run a high-end clinic where pregnant and normally poor girls can come to have and then give up their unwanted (at least by their parents or wider family and community if not necessarily by them) babies for unofficial surrogacy to normally well-off couples with a desperation for a baby (at least by their parents or wider family and community if not necessarily by them) – the couples paying a substantial fee which both provides much needed economic funds for the girls and an equally substantive profit for Grace.
 
Grace we learn has not shared her past with her husband – despite her husband admitting to her that he fathered a child when in the US – the differing standards which Nigerian society imposes on men and women (attitudes which to a Western reader are perhaps more reminiscent of the 1960s)
 
Grace’s plans are all about a future political careers but now however – just as COVID starts to impact the world – her world is turned upside down when her mother unexpectedly visits her home – forcing her both to confess her past to her husband and daughters (who react very badly) and confront her own feelings about: her parents (complicated by her father’s struggling with COVID), the parents of Baby’s father (complicated by the father having died recently and the parent’s convinced she has cursed them), Baby herself (with a newspaper advert raising a hope Grace may finally find Baby’s fate) and through all of that to really examine the morality and motivations behind her clinic.
 
Overall, the book is competently written and the character of Grace compelling – sufficiently so that I felt invested in how all of these issues would resolve even if their actual resolution was perhaps a little too redemptive for my purposes (while fitting to the book’s title).
 
Grace knew. She had always been as pragmatic as Ifeatu, but now, her emotions were usurping her rational, practical mind. She ran the clinic. Because she was practical. Women gave away babies and it didn’t kill them. It hadn’t killed her to have Baby taken from her. None of the arguments she would have used to convince herself worked this time. She couldn’t take another woman’s baby away from her, especially not if that woman was unwilling, could she? Things that did not kill you did not necessarily leave you fully alive either. They ate you up until you were a carcass of yourself, until no single moment of your life, no matter how joyful, wasn’t tinged with loss. For the first time since she got into the business, her resolve to be practical faltered.
 
My thanks to Canongate for an ACE via NetGalley

[Books By Your Bedside · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thanks to Canongate for sending me a proof copy of this book in return for an honest review.

I'm not sure this would have been a book I'd choose off the shelf myself because it sounded quite intense, but I would have seriously missed out.

It's not an easy book to read, subject wise. There are some difficult topics spoken about but Chika has handled them very well. They're not over the top or exhibitionist, they're honest and sympathetic without avoiding the difficulties they bring.

I loved Grace as a main character. She's been through some things - not all of which is her fault - and she's grown and made something of her personal and professional life. But she had my heart and my compassion right from the off and I really enjoyed following her story.

If you've ever wondered what people mean when they say something was an emotional gut punch, then read this book. It's not trying to be overly heart-breaking, but the beauty of her writing and the subject matter is wonderfully sad.

The gender imbalance touched on in this boo - the way boys and men can seemingly get away with anything unscathed, but it's the women who are left to deal with the consequences. It's very black and white in this book, and whilst it may not be quite as clear-cut in reality, I think it's more relatable than we might want to admit.

It's also interesting from a cultural perspective. I don't know much about Nigerian culture and it was fascinating to see the difference in how topics like teenage pregnancy and adoption can be viewed in somewhere like Nigeria compared to here in England.

Parts of it angered me too. There are moments where there is a complete lack of understanding and patience and love, that I was finding myself shaking the book, wanting to shake some sense into the characters at times.

It's light on dialogue and heavy on narrative, which I prefer. It gives us a deeper insight into Grace herself and the circumstances she has found herself in. I felt closer to her as a character this way than I thin I would have if it had just been her talking a lot.

It isn't a particularly long book, but given the quite serious topics I thought it would take me a while to get through, I thought it would be heavy. But I zoomed through it, it's so well written and so addictive. I HIGHLY recommend it.

[Nana · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was one of my most anticipated reads of 2026, so imagine my excitement when I was approved to read an ARC on NetGalley.

This is my first read by this author, and it did not disappoint.

The book opens with Grace, a woman in her early forties, devouring a cake. We soon learn it’s a ritual she’s kept up for the past 26 years in remembrance of the birthdate of a baby she gave away at the age of 15. Now a successful businesswoman and midwife running a clinic that provides babies to childless couples, and in a steady marriage that has yielded twin girls, Grace, on the outside, is the epitome of a woman who has it all. But does she?

Grace comes home one day to find the mother she told her husband was dead very much alive, sitting in her living room. Moving back and forth in time, we learn why Grace has lied to her husband for so many years, and whether she and her family will be able to survive this revelation.

I really liked this book, as the themes it explores—motherhood, forgiveness, agency, and identity—are ones I love reading about. The writing style was simple but evocative. Although I did not agree with Graces line of work for ethical reasons, the writer is still able to garner empathy from the reader giving food for thought as to why some women make the decisions they do. However, i felt the tension could have been ramped up slightly to give the book that gripping feeling that keeps the reader on the edge of her seat. It also dragged a little in the middle, and the ending felt slightly rushed. Still, it’s definitely one I’d recommend.

And a big thank you to the publisher @canongate for the ARC via NetGalley.

[Farah G · Rating 4 out of 5]

When 15 year old Grace, raised in a loving but conservative Nigerian family, gets pregnant, there is no question of her keeping the baby after the father's family denies all responsibility for the situation. But Grace is never able to forgive her parents for making her give up Baby.

Although she eventually has a good marriage, becomes the mother of twin girls, and runs a thriving maternity clinic, she is never able to forget the trauma of giving up Baby.

And now, over a quarter of a century later, Grace faces a reckoning when her mother unexpectedly shows up and her outraged husband demands to know why Grace has told him all these years that her parents were dead...

This is a fantastic novel. It addresses issues of family relationships, romance and marriage, parents and the failures of their parenting, adoption, cultural expectations, class issues, and so much more. It gets 4.5 stars and I wish I could read it all over again!

I received a free copy of this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review

[Treasure · Rating 3 out of 5]

Initial thought : it’s an ok read.
Don’t expect the same from this book as the middle daughter .

Book overview
We follow Grace’s story, at 15 year old she finds herself pregnant.
Keeping the baby is not an option after the father's family denies all responsibility for the unborn child .
To save the family from disgrace , Grace’s parent ask her to abandon the child after birth.
26 year later Grace is a wife and mother of twin girls. Who runs a thriving maternity clinic, helping other mother’s place their babies with well to do families.
When her mother who she cut all ties with unexpectedly shows up at her door with absurd demands. Her prefect crafted life is in danger.
She has to come clean to her husband , is heart broken and demands to know why Grace hasn’t told him all these years that her parents weren’t dead and that she had a baby before her twins. life as she knows is slowing break down.

Find out how she deal with it’s all in this
story that’s addresses issues of family relationships, marriage, parenting and cultural expectations.

[ivy ⋆｡˚ ❀ * · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novel touches on some deep topics, namely: pregnancy, motherhood, sacrifice, and forgiveness. But Unigwe writes in a such an emotive way, which feels authentic and true to the experience of a woman. I particularly enjoyed the passages where Grace navigates her own morality.

Although the direction of the novel was somewhat predictable (perhaps until the end which I thought was rushed), it flows beautifully from past to present, and delves into the nuances of families, Nigerian culture and motherhood well - all of which I loved.

There are quiet moments, but as the story unfolds you’re able to feel sad, angry, and confused alongside Grace. I wish we learned more about the other characters in Grace’s life, but I suppose the book is named after her after all.

This won’t be my last novel by Chika Unigwe. Thank you to NetGalley and Canongate Books for the opportunity to read this ARC.

[Leanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Grace is one of those quietly powerful novels that sneaks up on you and stays. It’s about secrets—the kind we bury deep, the kind that shape us—and the fragile hope of redemption.

Grace is a woman who’s built a life that looks perfect from the outside: a thriving clinic, twin daughters, a marriage that mostly works. But beneath it all is the ache of a daughter she gave up at fifteen, and the silence she’s kept ever since. When her estranged mother reappears, everything begins to unravel.

Chika Unigwe writes with such emotional precision. The story doesn’t shout—it pulses. It’s about motherhood, forgiveness, and the cost of survival. And it asks: what happens when the past refuses to stay buried?

If you love layered family dramas with heart and grit, this one’s a quiet stunner.

With thanks to Chika Unigwe, the publisher and NetGalley for the ARC.

[Hannah Jung · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a story that examines the consequences of giving mothers little support - financial, parental or social. It takes the universal theme of motherhood and family dynamics, and explores it within the specific cultural setting of Nigeria.

Grace, who gave birth at fifteen and was made to abandon her baby by her parents so as not to “ruin” her life, ends up running a clinic which pays desperate women for their babies, making false birth certificates and giving them to wealthy clients - a baby factory basically.

When Grace is reunited with the baby 26 years later she has to reexamine the ethics of this, her trauma, her marriage and her career.

There were one or two twists towards the end which I thought were unnecessary, and the overall resolution felt quite rushed. Overall, though, I enjoyed it and found it thought-provoking.

[Lara A · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you to Netgalley for a complimentary copy.

This is the second Chika Unigwe novel I've read, the first being her debut On Black Sisters Street. This is a much lighter read than OBSS. A frequent complaint I have about Nigerian novels published in the West, is that they are often much of a muchness. For such a diverse country, most of the stories seem to be from the south of the country, feature only Igbo characters and culture and the plot generally derives from the tension between the haves and the have nots. All of this is true here, but Unigwe can make what could be rather two dimensional characters engaging. From her previous work, I was expecting this to go to darker places and it doesn't. Here you can judge a book by it's cover, it's as sweet as cake, yet still a tasty read.

[Kofoworola Emily (Read Till You Drop) · Rating 4 out of 5]

ARC from NetGalley

I devoured this in one sitting while at the hairdresser's. It was a short and sweet story about grace (lol), redemption and restoration. I enjoyed that it was well-written and not as heavy as the author could have very easily made it. 

I was traumatised by The Middle Daughter, and I kept waiting for heavier shoes to drop; for Grace to really suffer more than she already had. Things didn't really happen in the way I thought they would, but it turned out to be a good thing.

I really liked this and am looking forward to owning a print copy.

[Deja · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Grace was not superstitious, but she believed in things. Like this ritual for one. Wherever Baby was, it connected Grace to her. If she gave it up, if she missed one year, then Baby would become a ghost.”

[Jamad · Rating 4 out of 5]

Set in Nigeria, Grace centres on a woman whose carefully ordered life is shaped by a decision made in her teens, when she became pregnant and was pressured into giving up her first child. Now married, professionally successful and the mother of twin daughters, Grace appears to have everything in place, until events force her to confront the past she has tried to keep firmly closed.

Despite its relatively short length, Unigwe packs a great deal into this novel. Themes of motherhood, faith, shame, forgiveness and female autonomy are handled with control and clarity, and the narrative moves confidently between past and present without feeling overburdened. Grace is drawn with sympathy but without indulgence, and the social and religious constraints surrounding her are convincingly portrayed.

The prose is economical and purposeful, giving the book a tight focus. At times the brevity means certain moments could have been explored in more depth, but overall the concision strengthens the impact of the story.

A strong and thoughtful novel that does a lot within a small number of pages. A solid four-star read.