"She could not complain about not having shoes when the person she was talking to had no legs"

"You wanted to feel disdain, to show it as you brought his order, because white people who liked Africa too much and t…"

"How can you love somebody and yet want to manage the amount of happiness that person is allowed?"

"Is it a good life, Daddy?” Nkiru has taken to asking lately on the phone, with that faint, vaguely troubling American…"

"She had come to understand that American parenting was a juggling of anxieties, and that it came with having too much…"

"She imagines the cocoa brown of Nnedi's eyes lighting up, her lips moving quickly, explaining that riots do not happe…"

"You knew you had become comfortable when you told him that you watched Jeopardy on the restaurant TV and that you roo…"

"The war took Zik," I said in Igbo. Speaking of death in English has always had, for me, a disquieting finality."

"Later, Chika will read in The Guardian that "the reactionary Hausa-speaking Muslims in the North have a history of vi…"

"But I am a Western-educated man, a retired mathematics professor of seventy-one, and I am supposed to have armed myse…"