The Bride Price was the first novel Emecheta wrote, but its original version was lost when her husband threw the manuscript on the fire – which act of destruction proved to be the last straw in an abusive marriage that she subsequently left.

[2] In the city of Lagos, the Ibo Aku-nna and her brother, Nna-nndo, are bid farewell by their father Ezekiel, who says he is going to the hospital for a few hours – their mother, Ma Blackie, is back home in Ibuza, performing fertility rites.

Peter Tinniswood, writing in The Times, called the novel "highly impressive", concluding: "In the last decade or so there has been some exciting literature coming from Black Africa, and this book is in the very top rank of the movement.

"[3] Anthony Thwaite wrote in The Observer: "Buchi Emecheta is an unstrivingly poignant writer, who convinces through plain narrative authenticity and a feeling for character.

[5] Susannah Clapp in The Times Literary Supplement noted that the quality of the novel "depends less on plot or characterization than on the information conveyed about a set of customs and the ideas which underlay them", while Valerie Cunningham in the New Statesman called it "a captivating Nigerian novel lovingly but unsentimentally written, about the survival of ancient marriage customs in modern Nigeria" adding that this book "proves Buchi Emecheta to be a considerable writer.

"[6] The review in The New Yorker commented: "The clash of Christian and African cultures, of generations, of ancient and modern pieties, and of group custom and the individual will are all vividly portrayed in this pure, fluid novel....

The author has a plain, engaging style and manages to convey all the lushness, poverty, superstition, and casual cruelty of a still exotic (to Western readers) culture while keeping her tale as sharp as a folk ballad.