Colours of Hatred

by Obinna Udenwe

On her deathbed, Leona seeks forgiveness by confessional. Dastardly as the sin is, it is an act of love, loyalty, disobedience, and perceived fairness. How did she get here, where she, an internationally renowned model, is forced to kill her father-in-law to avenge her mother’s death?

Set against a background of real events, Colours of Hatred is a complex web of plots detailing a woman’s journey from childhood through the fire and anvil of love, loss, betrayal, lust, and duty.

324 pages, Paperback

First published April 12, 2020

Reviews

[Uzoamaka · Rating 2 out of 5]

High hopes but this just reminded me why I have loved reading women written by women because this wasn’t it. Most of the action happens in the last few 30 or so pages and I feel we’re owed an epilogue to wrap up nicely.

[Lolá · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm honestly stretching it by rating this book 3 stars. I didn't enjoy the journey the writer so desperately wanted to take readers on. There's no depth to the characters. The dialogue, oh the dialogue completely 'offed' me. I'm usually generous with my reviews, but I just couldn't with this book. The premise is great, but the prose could have been better.

[Tutankhamun18 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Leona, a Sudanese Nigerian woman whose life is shaped by violence, loss, and unresolved guilt. The novel opens as she lies dying, desperate to confess a terrible secret, then moves backward through her life to show how war in Sudan, family breakdown, and migration to Nigeria leave lasting scars. As Leona grows older, she is pulled into a web of revenge and secrecy tied to her father’s demands and her own buried trauma.

At its core, the book explores how hatred is learned, inherited, and sustained. Udenwe links personal pain to larger social forces like ethnic conflict, religious tension, and rigid family expectations. Leona’s relationships, including her complicated connection with a priest named Kosi, show how love and violence often exist side by side. The shifting timeline slowly reveals how small choices, shaped by fear and grief, lead to devastating consequences.

I enjoyed the intrigue in this novel and the ways the reader is left womdering what Leona did, what her mother did, her father did and how violence, trauma and survival are inherited and shape people. The novel was very simply written and sometimes this made it somewhat boring to read. Also the characters remain slightly hollow and unreachable, an emotional connection to the characters is not established. Despite this I think the story is great and the novel wprth reading for the plot!

[Oluwafemi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Udenwe's Colours of Hatred is a good book. Here is a narrative that crisscrosses landscapes, transversing borders to bring the reader a story of a woman who at the end of her life, and who is examining that life from her earliest memories. While the plot leads us back in time, one wonders at the duplicity of human nature which is shown consistently through an array of characters in this novel.

A novel like this will generate questions that will definitely find their answers. I would like to think that that is one mark of good literature.

I recommend.