HOPE AND GLORY

AA brilliant debut by a British-Nigerian author—a heartfelt family drama that will delight book club readers and fans of books like Transcendent Kingdom, Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows, and The Girl with the Louding Voice.

Glory Akindele returns to London from her seemingly glamorous life in LA to mourn the sudden death of her father, only to find her previously close family has fallen apart in her absence. Her brother, Victor, is in jail and won't speak to her because she didn't come home for his trial. Her older sister, Faith, once a busy career woman, appears to have lost her independence and ambition, and is instead channeling her energies into holding together a perfect suburban family. Worst of all, their mother, Celeste, is headed toward a breakdown after the death of her husband and the shame of her son's incarceration.

Rather than returning to America, Glory decides to stay and try to bring them all together again. It's a tall order given that Glory's life isn't exactly working out according to plan either, and she's acutely aware that she's not so sure who she is and what she wants.

A chance reunion with a man she'd known in her teens—the perceptive but elusive Julian—gives her the courage to start questioning why her respectable but obsessively private Nigerian immigrant family is the way it is. But then Glory's questioning unearths a massive secret that shatters the family's fragile peace—and she risks losing everyone she deeply cares about in her pursuit of the truth and a reunited family.

Jendella Benson is a popular writer and editor for Black Ballad, and her work has appeared in The Guardian, BuzzFeed, MTV News UK, The Metro, The Huffington Post, and on MumsNet, amongst many others. Her short story, Kindling, was published in THE BOOK OF BIRMINGHAM, and she originated, crowd-funded and published a book of photography and interviews, YOUNG MOTHERHOOD, in 2016. She is a TEDx speaker and has also appeared on Woman's Hour, BBC World Service, London Live and OH TV. GLORY is her first novel, inspired by Jendella's discovery that for several decades, up to and including the 1990s, it was not uncommon for West African families in London to send their children to be fostered by white parents far beyond the capital.