GARDEN HOUSE. By Eno Obong

  

 

This is the story of a (Nigerian) lady,  Mayen, charming, cosmopolitan, suave and sophisticated  - yet she is haunted by the past.  She finds love in the end, but this is not a typical "woolly" love story. This book belongs to the pantheon of outstanding imaginative works published over the decades by African women authors. The author for one writes very well and fluently, with remarkable diction. This blog is happy to reproduce just three quotations from this exquisite book here...

 "It was the worst of the slums in Lagos... roadside lined with filth; a squishy, damp-soaked, maggot ridden mass of latent putrefaction that rose in occasional heaped piles and tumbled over, spreading on all sides..."

 "(Mayen) would bear the gifts to the shrine and return with Mammywater's own gift of hymenal beads... a promise of fecundity".

 And what a tender ending to such an excellent novel! -

"She cupped his hard buttocks pressing his flesh into her flesh, parting her thighs to receive him...she felt him cleaving a path deep into her womb rocking and flowing and receding, moving with the rhythm of the sea"

 True love, and blissful consummation at last...