Changes

Aidoo's spare, sharp love story follows Esi, a successful Accra statistician who leaves a husband she finds stifling, only to become the second wife of a charming businessman and confront afresh the bargains marriage demands of a modern African woman. The real city frames it: the government office where Esi works, the comfortable bungalows of the professional class, the businessman Ali's downtown enterprise, and the restaurants and streets of a booming Accra caught between tradition and change.

Esi

Esi's office

Chapter 1

At her desk in the Department of Urban Statistics, the educated, ambitious Esi has the independence and income few women of her world command, and guards them fiercely. Her career, and her refusal to let a husband's demands eclipse it, is the ground of the whole book's questioning of what marriage should ask of a modern woman.

Chapter 1

inferred Esi works as a statistician at a government department in Accra; the office is invented and sited in the real ministries district of the capital.

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