Source: All Africa. Com
Estranged from his children, pining for his ex-wife, and atypically barefoot in the dream home he designed himself, Kweku Sai, the prodigal surgeon pride of Ghana, dies of a heart attack.
This happens in the first tightly coiled sentence of Taiye Selasi’s debut novel Ghana Must Go, and then continues to happen over the next 90 pages – a staggering, fragmented introduction that launches the book’s big themes of family, loss, migration, and beauty.
The Sai family is a six-member unit. Kewku, the Ghanaian, marries Fola, the Nigerian, after the two of them meet in New England in the United States. Olu is their firstborn, and he’s as smart as his father, with a bright future in healthcare. Next come the twins, Taiwo and Kehinde, each one of them beautiful, the latter a famous artist, the former as rudderless as she is gifted. And the youngest is Sadie, rife with ego insecurities and an eating disorder, aching for her mother and cowed by the luminosity of her siblings.