Upon returning home, he is confronted by his wife, Oyo, who does not understand why the man refuses to participate in financial dealings which would better their family’s life.

Oyo comments on a deal Koomson has mentioned to her involving fishing boats that she believes will make their family rich.

The man is once again bombarded with feelings of guilt and shame when he sees the material differences between his children’s lives and that of Koomson’s daughter, Princess.

One day, the man leaves work only to learn that there has been a military coup, and Nkrumah’s government ministers are being arrested and placed under protective custody.

[1] First published in 1968 by Houghton Mifflin in the US (where the author studied at Columbia University, 1968–70),[1] The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born received critical acclaim, with "generally favorable, and often glowing, reviews", as Jacob Littleton put it: "With this one book, Armah established himself as a writer with a worldwide reputation.

"[2] Kirkus Reviews stated: "In the groping stretch between colonialism and a strong national identity one of the natural attitudes is a sour malaise.

This young Ghanian [sic] author has caught the vanishing ends of two worlds in a bitter, acerbic novel of one man's spiritual trials in a new West African nation.

There was a tendency, from the beginning, to contrast this supposed authorial virtuosity with the novel's subject matter, rather inaccurately summed up as the pervasive negativity of the human condition in Africa.

To professional Egyptologists, it is a praise name for a central figure in Ancient Egyptian culture, the dismembered and remembered Osiris, a sorrowful reminder of our human vulnerability to division, fragmentation and degeneration, and at the same time a symbol of our equally human capacity for unity, cooperative action, and creative regeneration.

I remember no special attachment to the mythic figure in those days, but by the time I wrote the novel my impressions of Osiris, though still relatively disorganised, had evolved to the point where I was ready to recognise the image as a powerful artistic icon.

Here, in mythic form, was the essence of active, innovative human intelligence acting as a prime motive force for social management.