Family Secret

Eze Donald Akudike, now retired from a successful career in business, lives with his wife, Ugomma, in their hometown of Umuoha, Nigeria. Long ago, when the two of them were students in England, they lost their daughter, Adaku, to social services. Now, twenty-four years later, she is coming to Nigeria to stay with her birth parents. In England, Adaku has grown up enjoying an unfettered lifestyle, with every necessity except parental and community input. Then, in Nigeria, she experiences an environment with an absence of every comfort except what is made available by immediate family, where individual lifestyle conforms to the expectation of the community, where everybody is each other's keeper, and life is lived on the dictates of culture and tradition. Adaku finds herself struggling to change her perception, attitude, and approach to life. As she learns to cope with this new life, she begins to discover who she really is, the price she must pay, and the future she hopes to build. In this novel, when a Nigerian couple reunites with their twenty-four-year-old daughter, who was raised in the UK, friction arises as the young woman acclimates to a culture she has never known.