[In the following review, McKnight offers a favorable assessment of The Family.]

“The writer with the tin ear,” wrote John Gardener, in his book On Becoming a Novelist, who is good enough at other things, “may in the end write deeper, finer novels than the most eloquent verbal musicians.” It was the writer's facility with those “other things“—the development of “character, action, setting” and ideas, which Gardner called “profluence”—that compelled the reader to turn the page.

There are, of course many novelists whose prose is both poetic and profluent: Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, Nathanael West. But some of the most highly regarded novelists (Balzac, Crane, Orwell), as Gardner suggested, are no poets at all.

Most readers, no doubt, would include the works of the Nigerian writer Buchi Emecheta in the latter category. The prose in her latest novel, The Family, like that of her earlier works (particularly Double Yoke and The Slave Girl) is generally vivid, plain and clear—the kind of prose that illuminates rather than buries the characters and settings it describes: “Winston was everything Gladys said he was, so why did she feel this eel of distrust coiled about [his] memory?” But there are times when the language is barely firm enough to carry images and ideas: “Gwendolen was not the cleverest of people. She could be slow, but she was not thick-skinned.”

Nevertheless, occasional lapses such as this do not hinder our being moved and intrigued by the novel's principal character, Gwendolen Brillianton, a young girl from Granville, Jamaica, whose mother and father leave her with her grandmother. Granny Naomi, to seek a better life for themselves in England, the “Moder Kontry.” Very soon after their departure, a close family friend molests the 8-year-old Gwendolen. And because “she did not like Uncle Johnny troubling her at night, and she did not like to see Granny Naomi unhappy,” Gwendolen flees to the home of her paternal grandmother, Elinor, who lives in Kingston. But before she is even fully reacquainted with her family in Kingston they rebuff her, intimating that because they are fair-skinned and Gwendolen dark, she does not belong. Thus far, less than one-tenth of the narrative has been traversed. Gwendolen will see and feel much, much more once her parents finally send for her.

In this rich, complex and fast-moving novel, one breathlessly follows Gwendolen from Granville to London in her search for love, family and a place “where she could be herself—happy, trusting Gwendolen again.” And through this journey we see her suffer rape, incest, racism, teen-age pregnancy and loneliness. She endures the indignities of illiteracy and remedial education, falls in love with a boy her mother describes as a “dirty white” and veers toward madness. We witness the social and economic dynamics that force both Gwendolen and her mother to “remain alive for others. … to look after members of their families, to boost the ego of the man in their lives, be the man a father, a husband, or even a son. And they were to nurture and act as agony aunts to their offspring. But to live for themselves was not to be.”

In many ways Ms. Emecheta probably speaks from experience. Not only is she a novelist, a research fellow at the University of Calabar, Nigeria, and a member of Britain's Advisory Council to the Home Secretary on Race and Equality, but she is also a mother of five. She speaks from a vantage point that few of us know. Her London, for example, is a cold, gray, multicultural world, a world made up of Ibos, Anglos, Yorubas, Jamaicans—both fair and dark—Greeks, Indians, the educated, the undereducated, the dispossessed, the alienated. Ms. Emecheta's novel shows us—as do many other important works of African and African-American literature—that a large number of the problems that plague the African diaspora—rootlessness, “hue prejudice,” self-hatred and perhaps even some of the sexual violence that nearly destroys Gwendolen—are the direct result of slavery and colonialism. But Buchi Emecheta is no ideologue; her characters do not utter or think words that would not come from them; they are not mere representatives of larger social movements but real, complex human beings, shaped by the vicissitudes of class, culture and sexual politics. She raise the right questions, but never harangues. She writes with subtlety, power and abundant compassion. The Family is a good book, and one not easily forgotten.