Everything Good Will Come is a coming-of-age novel by Nigerian author Sefi Atta about a girl growing into a woman in postcolonial Nigeria and England.

Throughout the novel the main character, Enitan, is faced with various personal entanglements connected with family troubles, rape, cheating boyfriends, and imprisonment.

Everything Good Will Come is a bildungsroman that tells the story of Enitan, a young Nigerian woman growing up in her native homeland coping with the demands of the patriarchal society that encompasses her.

Enitan is raised in a divided home struggling to identify herself in the midst of her mother's strong religious beliefs and her father's manipulative political ways.

Years pass and Enitan returns to Lagos to stay with her father and work under him to start her career as a lawyer.

Sheri believes in playing the system rather than settling down with a man because she is aware of the lack of individualism a woman receives once she becomes married in their society.

Enitan gradually becomes closer with a man called Niyi Franco, who is separated from his only child who was taken away by his ex-wife when they moved to Britain.

Enitan at first feels comfort and safety in Niyi's arms, but their relationship is soon tested when she refuses to submit to his demanding ways and struggles to conceive and carry a child.

In addition to the stress from her failing marriage, her father's political outspokenness and subsequent arrest forces her into activism and results in a night in jail.

Enitan continues to stand up for what she believe: wanting women to have the ability to choose whether or not they will be submissive in society with hopes for individuality.

First, she comes home from college and has to go through military training and later she has to deal with gas shortages, being stopped on the roadside by soldiers, her father's and her own arrest.

At the end of the novel she breaks tradition and leaves her husband to lead a group of women fighting for the release of political prisoners.

Sheri knows how to take advantage of the fact that men often stray from their marriages in Nigeria and it is even considered normal to have more than one wife or women on the side.

Sunny's character shows how hard it is to escape the traditional mindset that the males in Nigerian culture have the final word regardless of what the women think.

At the beginning of their relationship Niyi is just like her father and tells her to stand up for her rights when the men at her job try to take advantage of her in a work-related way.

This contributes to their divorce but the major reason is that Niyi refuses to support Enitan's interest helping women prisoners.

Throughout the book, which covers many years, political unrest is present and, though it is not explicitly said, much of this conflict has to do with religion and the distribution of wealth and power.

She talks about how people are being imprisoned without charge, the suspension of the constitution all by the military regimes that had taken over Nigeria in order to enforce peace and discipline in the country.

Sunny uses his wife's religion as a way to belittle her, call her crazy and endanger Enitan's life, which, at times is not completely false.

Yet, the importance of religion to Mama Enitan is strong as she has lost her son to disease, suffers through a bad marriage and is subject to the dual pressure put on all the Nigerian women that result from colonization and sexist societal attitudes; she turns to religion as one would self-medicate with drugs, alcohol or sexual activity as an escape from reality.

By being based in a true Nigerian culture and political atmosphere, this fictional story has relevance to the time period in which it is set.

This relation between fact and fiction gives the reader insight to how likely and the effect politics could play a role within each character's life.

The history of this novel follows Nigeria through a civil war and into the Second and Third Republic, all times of different political powers but connected through the character's lives.

[3] The parallels between the Sefi's and Enitan's lives allow the novel to have a realistic foundation and give accurate insight to the history and culture of this time period.

The generation Enitan represents was born in the late 1960s, so is younger by comparison with those in many other novels of similar genre, giving Atta's book a unique perspective.

In terms of this generational representation, Atta states: "I consciously did not hold back as I wrote and ended up with this very personal chronicle of post-independent Nigeria.

The argument against colonialism is discussed by the characters: "Uncle Alex blamed the British for the fighting ‘...Come here and divide our country like one of their bloody teacakes.’"[4] Because of this blame on the British, this novel has more significance in its publication locations: the United States, England, and Nigeria, all of which have become united through colonization, which brought western culture into Nigeria.

At this time, England and the United States were seen as more progressive in gender ideals through women having the ability to maintain independence, but they still faced discrimination in the work place as Enitan did in her father's firm.

To combat these issues Atta shows the negative effects and allows her main female protagonists to gain independence in the conclusion of the novel.

This positive outlook on a woman's ability to become self-sufficient and successful against family and political strains of this time contributed to this novel receiving the Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa.