In The Ditch: (Omenala Press)

This breakthrough novel by Buchi Emecheta is a fresh today as when it was first first published in 1972. Adah, the African ingenue in London, not only bears witness to the poverty that surrounds her, but with compassion and self-deprecating humour finds common cause with her white working-class neighbours and their struggle against a social system that appears designed to oppress all women. Buchi Emecheta writes in a vivid, autobiographical style of the experiences of a young Nigerian woman, separated from her husband and living with her five small children in the slums of North London. In spite of the desperateness of the situation, Adah is proud and ambitious and determined to retain her independence. But the social workers decide that it is impossible for her to have a daytime job, continue the evening classes where she is studying for a degree, as well as on her own look after a handful of lively children. So, inevitably, the welfare system goes into action. Adah and her children are forced to join the ranks of the `problem families' whose only hope of retaining their sanity lies in the ability to hold onto the good spirits and, above all, to their dreams.

About the Author :
Buchi Emecheta was born in Lagos, Nigeria in July 1944. She emigrated to England in 1962 with her husband and two small children. After the break-up of her marriage and now with five small children to support, she lived in a series of slum apartments, while working full time at the British museum and studying for a Sociology degree. In 1972, she contributed a column about black British life to the New Statesman magazine which formed the basis for her first published novel In The Ditch. While her children were growing she worked for a number of years as a teacher and a social worker, before settling down in the 1980s in her north London home as a full-time writer and academic. Buchi Emecheta wrote 16 novels during her lifetime including The Joys of Motherhood, Second-Class Citizen, and the Slave Girl in 1978 for which she won the Jock Campbell New Statesman award. She wrote several children's stories and plays for stage, TV and radio, as well as a formal autobiography Head Above Water. In 1983, she was included as one Granta's Best of Young British Novelists, and in 2005, she was made an OBE for services to literature. She died in London in 2017 at the age of 72.

Review :
"...tells simply and readably, what it is like to fall by the wayside in these days of affluence" Sunday Telegraph; "Seeing England and our welfare system through Nigerian eyes is a disturbing, but healthy experience." Daily Telegraph