[1] It tells the tragic story of Nnu-Ego, daughter of Nwokocha Agbadi and Ona, who had a bad fate with childbearing.

Traditional tribal values and customs begin to shift with increasing colonial presence and influence, pushing Nnu Ego to challenge accepted notions of "mother", "wife", and "woman".

Through Nnu Ego's journey, Emecheta forces her readers to consider the dilemmas associated with adopting new ideas and practices against the inclination to cleave to tradition.

In this novel, Emecheta reveals and celebrates the pleasures derived from fulfilling responsibilities related to family matters in child-bearing, mothering, and nurturing activities among women.

During his period of recovery, he sleeps with her, and shortly thereafter he finds out that his senior wife Agunwa is very ill. She later dies, and it is thought that perhaps she became ill as a result of seeing her husband making love to Ona on his apparent deathbed.

The hapless slave is pushed into the shallow grave but struggles out, appealing to her owner Agbadi, whose eldest son cries angrily: "So my mother does not deserve a decent burial?"

Ona becomes pregnant from sleeping with Agbadi and delivers a baby girl named Nnu Ego ("twenty bags of cowries").

After several months with no sign of fruitfulness, she consults several herbalists and is told that the slave woman who is her Chi (or patron goddess) will not give her a child.

Her husband, a laundryman for a white man, is drafted into the army during wartime, but on her own Nnu Ego can barely manage to feed them.

She scrimps and saves to provide a secondary school education for her oldest son, in the hope that he will help support the rest of the family.

The reviewer for West Africa magazine wrote: "Buchi Emecheta has a way of making readable and interesting ordinary events.

"[4] A. N. Wilson stated in The Observer: "Buchi Emecheta has a growing reputation for her treatment of African women and their problems.