Nikki May’s This Motherless Land is a novel about belonging, but it is also about the difficulty of being claimed by more than one place. Set between Nigeria and England, it follows Funke Oyenuga, a mixed-race girl growing up in Lagos in the late 1970s, whose comfortable childhood is abruptly ended by the death of her British mother. Her father sends her to England to live with her mother’s estranged family, and Funke is forced to negotiate a country, a family and an identity that are all unfamiliar to her.

The Lagos of Funke’s childhood is one of privilege and pleasure: Tarkwa Bay, the Ikoyi Club, bicycle races, parties and the company of expatriate families and friends. Her parents’ marriage has been opposed by both families, but within their own home they have managed to build a happy life. Her mother’s death destroys that fragile arrangement. In England, Funke finds little of the warmth she has known. The Ring, the Somerset home of her maternal family, is cold and nearly decrepit, while her aunt Margot has turned her resentment towards Funke’s mother into a settled hostility towards the girl who has arrived in her place.

Funke is, at best, tolerated. Her grandparents defer to Margot, and her cousin Dominic offers little comfort. Liv, however, is different. She shares something of Funke’s mother’s temperament and is genuinely pleased to discover that she has a cousin from Nigeria. The friendship between the two girls develops almost in spite of the family around them.

Related ArticleOghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki Was Convicted In Public. The Correction Came as a Footnote.→

May tells their story through alternating perspectives, following Funke and Liv from childhood into adulthood and across several periods in their lives. As they grow older, the friendship is repeatedly tested by what they have inherited from their families, by race and class, by grief and by the very different ways in which they understand their shared past. The result is an engaging novel that is often funny, sometimes painful, and particularly good at observing the small differences and larger contradictions between Nigeria and England.

May is at her best when she is writing about those contrasts. She does not have to explain the differences between the two societies; she finds them in ordinary things. Food, family behaviour, social expectations and the privileges attached to knowing the right people become part of the novel’s comedy. The Nigerian habit of relying on connections, what might be called having a “long leg”, is not presented as some uniquely Nigerian failing. England has its own networks of privilege, though they may be dressed differently.

There is also an enjoyable Austen-like quality to the misunderstandings and revelations that drive parts of the story. This is, after all, a retelling of Mansfield Park, and May understands that social behaviour often reveals more than characters intend. People expose themselves through what they consider normal, respectable or deserved.

But the novel’s more serious concern is Funke’s struggle to belong. In Lagos she is conscious of being different because of her mixed-race appearance. In England, the difference acquires another meaning. She is now the girl from Nigeria. The adjustment is complicated further by her name. She reluctantly adopts Kate, her English middle name, as if even her identity must be made acceptable to her new surroundings.

There is something particularly affecting about the ease with which Funke learns to adjust. She becomes shiftable, moving between identities according to where she is and who is looking at her. Her ability to adapt is useful, but it is also a reminder of what is being demanded of her. She is repeatedly asked to fit into places that have already decided what she is. In Funke, May makes belonging less a matter of finding home than of continually negotiating the terms on which one is permitted to inhabit it.

Liv’s position is more complicated. May does not make her simply a representative of white privilege, but she does not allow that privilege to disappear either. Liv believes herself to be unlike her mother and brother, and in many respects she is. Yet her good intentions do not prevent her from participating in some of the assumptions that make Funke feel like an outsider. She doubts Funke’s memories of Lagos. She encourages her English name. She does not initially understand the extent of the neglect surrounding her.

Some of this is the blindness of childhood. Adulthood brings a harder reckoning. Liv eventually has to confront the guilt attached to what she failed to see, as well as the grief and questions of self-worth that follow. Her story is therefore not simply a counterpoint to Funke’s. It is another account of growing up inside the consequences of decisions made by other people.

Funke and Liv occupy central places in each other’s lives, but their relationship is never allowed to exist without interference. The past is always present. So are family resentments, racial difference and unequal privilege. Their difficulties are not caused by one thing alone, and May is strongest when she resists making either woman entirely responsible for the distance between them.

What survives between them is consequently more interesting than the circumstances that repeatedly threaten it. This is a friendship that has to contend with geography, family history and the different worlds the women have inherited. It is also a relationship in which love does not automatically produce understanding. The novel asks what it takes for people to recognise the parts of one another they have been unable, or unwilling, to see.

There are, however, places where This Motherless Land feels less assured. Some important moments are hurried, and a few resolutions seem to arrive before the emotional work required to support them has been fully done. May’s treatment of Margot is particularly disappointing. She is given a clear grievance and an understandable history, but too little complexity. Her bitterness eventually becomes so pronounced that she begins to resemble a stock villain, which sits awkwardly beside the more thoughtful treatment of Funke and Liv.

Dominic suffers from a similar problem. There is little room for him to become more than an obstacle within the family dynamic. This is unfortunate because a more developed treatment of these characters could have deepened the novel’s examination of inheritance: how resentment, privilege and prejudice pass from one generation to another, often without anyone consciously choosing to carry them.

These are shortcomings, but they do not overwhelm the novel. This Motherless Land remains a moving account of two women whose lives are shaped by a family divided between Nigeria and England, and by the losses that make that division more painful.

For Funke, the question of home is never settled. Lagos is the place of childhood and memory; England is the country she is expected to learn to call home. Between the two, she is left to construct a self that can survive both.

May’s novel understands the cost of that construction. It is about a girl who loses her mother, but also about what happens when the loss of a person forces a reconsideration of family, country and identity. Its most affecting idea is that belonging is not always something a person is given. Sometimes it is something she has to keep making for herself.