Around hour three, Anna asks herself a question that stopped me mid-stride on the lakefront: "What do you call a man who is both your father and a dictator?"
I actually had to pause. Denise asked if I was okay. I wasn't sure.
Chibundu Onuzo has written something that feels less like a novel and more like an excavation. Anna is in her fifties, recently divorced, watching her mother's memory dissolve into dementia before death finally takes her. And in the aftermath, sorting through boxes of a life she thought she understood, she finds student diaries. Her father's diaries. The African student her white English mother loved in 1970s London. The radical who went home to become president. Or dictator. Depending on who you ask.
The Weight of Inherited Silences
What Onuzo does brilliantly—and I mean this as someone who has taught identity narratives for two decades—is refuse to give Anna easy answers. She doesn't find a hero or a monster in Africa. She finds a man. A complicated, charismatic, morally compromised man who genuinely seems pleased to meet his daughter while also being responsible for things that should make her run.
The novel moves between London and this unnamed West African nation with a fluidity that mirrors Anna's own fractured sense of belonging. She's too Black for England, too English for Africa. Too old to be starting this journey, too alive to stop. My students would recognize this feeling immediately—that sense of being caught between worlds that never fully claim you.
Sara Powell's narration carries this duality with remarkable skill. Her British-Jamaican accent shifts subtly depending on whose world Anna is inhabiting. When Anna speaks with her ex-husband Robert, there's a clipped formality, a holding-back. When she's with her father's people, Powell loosens something—not quite an accent change, but a different rhythm. A different breath pattern. It's the kind of interpretive choice that separates reading from performance.
Powell Makes You Hear the Silences
I've listened to enough audiobooks to know when a narrator understands that pause is punctuation. Powell gets it. There's a moment when Anna confronts her father about the disappearances, the political prisoners, the rumors. The silence before his response—Powell holds it exactly long enough to make you uncomfortable. To make you complicit in Anna's waiting.
The character differentiation is strong enough that I occasionally forgot this was a single narrator. Anna's daughter Kate has this particular edge of millennial impatience that Powell captures without mockery. Francis, the father, carries a kind of presidential weight even in intimate conversation. You can hear the decades of power in how he forms sentences.
At nine hours, this is a focused listen. Not padded, not rushed. Onuzo trusts her readers to sit with discomfort, and Powell trusts her listeners to pay attention.
What the Title Actually Means
Sankofa is an Akan concept—the idea of going back to fetch what you've forgotten. It's often represented by a bird with its head turned backward. Anna's entire journey is this: turning back to understand what was lost, what was hidden, what was deliberately buried.
But here's what makes Onuzo's novel more than a simple identity quest. Anna doesn't just find her father. She finds a country. A political reality. A history of colonialism and independence and corruption that implicates everyone, including her. The novel asks: What do you owe a place you've never been? What do you inherit from a parent you've never known?
These aren't rhetorical questions. The novel doesn't answer them. It just makes you live inside them for nine hours.
Who Should Make This Journey
If you loved Americanah or Homegoing, this is their spiritual successor—though quieter, more interior, less epic in scope. Perfect Hope operates in that same reflective register, though with a completely different setting. It's a middle-aged woman's story, which means it's paced like a middle-aged woman's life: reflective, occasionally frustrated, surprisingly funny in moments you don't expect.
Skip if you need constant plot momentum. This is character-driven in the truest sense—the external journey matters less than what it reveals about Anna's internal landscape.
I finished this at 11 PM, papers still ungraded on my desk. Denise was already asleep. I sat in the dark for a while, thinking about my own father, about the stories we inherit and the ones we have to go looking for.
The prose deserves to be savored. Powell makes sure you can.
Worth Pausing the Faculty Meeting For
Onuzo has written something that respects your intelligence while breaking your heart a little. It's not a comfortable listen—it shouldn't be. But it's the kind of book that changes how you think about identity, inheritance, and the complicated love we can feel for people who don't deserve it.
My students would probably find it slow. I loved it.
