The concubine

Elechi Amadi's first novel, The Concubine, was published by Heinemann Educational Books in 1966 as part of the African Writers Series.

The village it describes is remote and orderly, a place where life is predictable and where the traditional gods still rule. Its people fish and hunt along the Niger delta, and the novel is as much concerned with the way their society works as with the story it tells.

At the centre of it is Ihuoma, a woman whose beauty and dignity bring suffering and death to the men who love her, one after another, in a pattern the community tries to understand in terms of the gods it worships. Amadi works entirely inside the beliefs of that world, so that the misfortunes of Ihuoma's suitors are never explained away from outside it, and the book has been read ever since as one of the classic Nigerian novels of the 1960s, and as an early landmark of the Heinemann list. A film version, written by Amadi himself, was premiered in Abuja in 2007.