Summary

The first chapter begins in Botu, where a teenage girl named Aminah lives a simple life with her grandmother (Eeyah), her father (Baba, a shoemaker), his two wives (her mother Na, and his second wife, Issa-Na), her siblings (twin girls Hassana and Husseina) and half-brother (Issa-Na’s son, Issa). She sells food to the Islamic merchants who come through Botu in caravans, and one day, a man in a turban makes an inappropriate sexual advance on her and she rushes away. Lately, she has been hearing stories of people snatched away by horsemen. Aminah, who is prone to daydreaming, wants to be a shoemaker like her father, not a wife. The chapter closes as Baba leaves for Jenne to sell shoes.

The next chapter switches perspectives and turns to the novel’s other heroine: Wurche, the willful daughter of one of the three lesser...