The London-based Nigerian writer Buchi Emecheta continues to grow in talent and craftsmanship. The novel The Slave Girl, her fourth book, is her most accomplished work so far. It is coherent, compact and convincing. It also represents a considerable achievement for a writer who … has worked under very difficult conditions….

[In] general the slave girls are not too badly off. Emecheta describes their life in the context of early twentieth-century Onitsha society, in which buying and selling people was accepted as a situation that "could not be helped." It provided labor on the one hand in exchange for a roof and food on the other.

[The novel's framework is simple], but Emecheta has unobtrusively woven into it a great deal of sociological detail. All the background information is skillfully integrated, and the young girl's story makes fascinating reading. Emecheta displays considerable insight and a broadly-based knowledge of people's...