Fiction · English
Nnedimma Okoli · Bridges · 2025
What does a new beginning feel like for the family members whose lives unfold beyond the university? Nnedimma Okoli’s debut novel, Torn Between Homes, follows Ifeoma, a young Nigerian mother who joins her academic husband in Mainz in 1993.
Pregnancy, the arrival of a second child, language barriers, and racial scrutiny gradually unsettle the promise of their new life. Ifeoma misses the familiar relationships and shared care that sustained her in Nigeria. The novel gives space to domestic experiences that can disappear behind the public story of academic migration.
Why we are reading it
For BGHRA readers, the book offers an opening into Black family life in Germany, motherhood across borders, and the meaning of home. Okoli drew inspiration from interviews with her mother, while creating fictional characters and reshaping events. That relationship between remembered experience and imaginative storytelling makes it especially relevant to conversations about family archives and whose lives enter the record.
Find the book
Torn Between Homes — paperback information
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-0699317-1-9. Readers may also request the title through their library or local bookseller.
Continue reading
- Sharon Dodua Otoo, Ada’s Room — fiction connecting women’s lives across generations and continents; translated by Jon Cho-Polizzi.
- Tupoka Ogette, Trotzdem zuhause — a memoir of Black childhood, belonging, and self-determination.
A conversation to carry into your reading: What do families preserve through stories, and what remains unspoken?
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