Finding Home: Notes from a life rebuilt

Everyone thinks they know her.They see the accent, the composure, the rooms she walks into as though she has always belonged there. What they cannot see is the question she has carried since she was four years old: where, exactly, is home?Onyinye was born in eastern Nigeria to a mother who was a daughter before she was ever allowed to be a child. A mother forbidden to inherit from her own father, who married a wife into his name to rescue his lineage, then defied everyone to have a daughter of her own.That daughter grows up gifted, watched, and never quite belonging. She survives a boarding house, an engineering faculty of two hundred and fifty boys, an engagement to a man who turned violent, and a wedding cancelled five days before it. She marries her best friend and builds a good life. Then she loses her mother, her marriage and her business inside the same season.She arrives in Scotland with a thousand pounds, no map, and her children left behind until she can send for them. And she begins again.Finding Home is a memoir about belonging, migration, faith and the cost of starting over. It is serious about all of it, and it is very funny, because that is how her people survive things. Each chapter opens with an Igbo proverb that the chapter then earns.For anyone who has ever arrived somewhere with more courage than certainty.