On Black Sisters Street tells the haunting story of four very different women who have left their African homeland for the riches of Europe—and who are thrown together by bad luck and big dreams into a sisterhood that will change their lives.
Each night, Sisi, Ama, Efe, and Joyce stand in the windows of Antwerp’s red-light district, promising to make men’s desires come true—if only for half an hour. Pledged to the fierce Madam and a mysterious pimp named Dele, the girls share an apartment but little else—they keep their heads down, knowing that one step out of line could cost them a week’s wages. They open their bodies to strangers but their hearts to no one, each focused on earning enough to get herself free, to send money home or save up for her own future.
Then, suddenly, a murder shatters the still surface of their lives. Drawn together by tragedy and the loss of one of their own, the women realize that they must choose between their secrets and their safety. As they begin to tell their stories, their confessions reveal the face in Efe’s hidden photograph, Ama’s lifelong search for a father, Joyce’s true name, and Sisi’s deepest secrets—-and all their tales of fear, displacement, and love, concluding in a chance meeting with a handsome, sinister stranger.
About the Author
Chika Unigwe was born in Enugu, Nigeria. She holds a BA degree in English Language and Literature from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka and a PhD from the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. In 2003, she was shortlisted for the Caine Prize for African fiction. In 2004, she won the BBC Short Story Competition and a Commonwealth Short Story Competition award. In 2008, she was the UNESCO Contributors’ Aschberg fellow at the Civitella Ranieri Centre and in 2009 she was a Rockefeller Foundation fellow at the Bellagio Centre.
Her fiction has been widely published in literary journals and anthologies, and has been broadcast on several radio stations. She is author of On Black Sisters Street (2011, Random House NY); Nightdancer (2012, Jonathan Cape, London) and is also the author of two children’s books published by Macmillan, London.
Chika Unigwe lives in Turnhout, Belgium.
Other Books by the Author
Nightdancer
Waiting
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