Ghana Must Go

Taiye Selasi

Mar 2013 · Penguin Random House Audio · Narrated by Adjoa Andoh

About this audiobook

Introducing a powerful new novelist whose evocation of an unforgettable African family is testament to the transformative power of unconditional love

Kwaku Sai is dead. A renowned surgeon and failed husband, he succumbs suddenly at dawn outside the home he shares in Ghana with his second wife. The news of Kwaku’s death sends a ripple around the world, bringing together the family he abandoned years before. Ghana Must Go is their story.

Electric, exhilarating, beautifully crafted, Ghana Must Go follows the Sais’ journey, moving with great elegance through time and place to share the truths hidden and lies told; the crimes committed in the name of love. In the wake of Kwaku’s death, the family gathers in Ghana, at their mother, Fola’s, new home. The eldest son and his new wife; the mysterious, beautiful twins; their baby sister, now a young woman—all come together for the first time in years, each carrying secrets of his own. What is revealed in their coming together is the story of how they came apart.

But the horrible fragility of the world they have built soon becomes clear, and Kwaku’s leaving begets a series of betrayals that none of them could have imagined. Splintered, alone, each navigates his pain, believing that what has been lost can never be recovered—until, in Ghana, a new way forward, a new family, begins to emerge.

Ghana Must Go is at once a portrait of a family and an exploration of the importance of where we come from and our obligations to one another. In a sweeping narrative that takes us from West Africa to New England to London, Ghana Must Go teaches that the stories we share with one another can build a new future.

About the author

Taiye Selasi was born in London and raised in Massachusetts. She holds a BA in American studies from Yale and an MPhil in international relations from Oxford University. "The Sex Lives of African Girls" (Granta, 2011), Selasi's fiction debut, appears in Best American Short Stories 2012. Author of Ghana Must Go, she lives in Rome.

Adjoa Andoh is a British actress of film, television, and stage, and a voice-over artist. Her theatrical work includes A Streetcar Named Desire and, for the Royal Shakespeare Company, The Dispute, The Odyssey, and Tamburlaine. Her television credits include Jonathan Creek, Close Relations, A Rather English Marriage, and Twelve Angry Men. A prolific narrator, Andoh is the voice of Alexander McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series and won The Guardian’s Best Audiobook of the Year for Tea Time for the Traditionally Built.