“A marriage told from the half nobody asks about.”
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Everyone in the building knows the Okafors as the couple who never raise their voices. What they don't know is the arithmetic Adaeze has been doing for eleven years — what she gave up, what she's owed, and what's left if she finally stops paying. Told in the quiet, devastating register of a woman doing the sums in private, The Quiet Half is a novel about the half of a marriage that doesn't get to narrate itself, until now.
I read this manuscript in a single sitting and then read the last forty pages again immediately. Ngozi writes the unsaid better than anyone we've published — this is a book about silence that never once goes quiet.
— Funke Adisa, Editorial Director
Adaeze had learned, over eleven years, that the trick to a long marriage was never to ask the question you actually wanted answered. You asked the smaller one. Did you eat. Did you lock the gate. Is the generator off. The big question sat behind all of them, patient as furniture, and she had gotten so good at not asking it that some nights she forgot it was there at all.
Tonight it was there. He came in past ten, smelling of someone else's perfume and his own apology, and she watched him take off his shoes in the dark like a man who had rehearsed it.
"You ate?" she said, because eleven years had taught her exactly where to start.
The first chapter ends here.
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