Summary

Chapter 1 consists of a single sentence: “They burned down the market on the day Vivek Oji died” (1).

At the beginning of Chapter 2, the third-person narration remarks that if the story was “a stack of photographs” (3), it would begin with Chika, Vivek’s father. The narration shifts into the past tense, describing Chika as an attractive man at the age of 20 before introducing Ahunna, Chika’s mother, sitting on the veranda of her village home. On this day, Chika’s mother had injured herself by stepping on a stick, and Mary, who had married Chika’s brother Ekene a few months earlier, had taken her to the hospital. Mary was staying with Ahunna while Ekene was away preparing for a move to the town of Owerri. Chika thought Mary looked like “something he could fall into, whirling through her hips and thighs and breasts...