Pride and Joy follows the Okafor family over one Easter weekend in Toronto, Canada, as they gather to celebrate matriarch Mama Mary’s seventieth birthday on Good Friday. When Mama Mary dies in her sleep, her sister Nancy declares she will resurrect on Easter Sunday, transforming an intimate family tragedy into a public spectacle.
Filled with humour and flawed, deeply relatable characters that leap off the page, Pride and Joy will draw you in as the Okafors prepare for a miracle while coming apart at the seams, praying that they have not actually lost Mama Mary for good, and grappling with what losing her truly means for each of them. The story explores how each family member — Joy, Michael, Rob, Nnenna, and the younger generation — grapples with grief, family secrets, and the collision between faith and reason.
The novel explores grief, family dynamics, faith and superstition, identity, generational conflict, belonging, cultural duality, boundaries, forgiveness, and love through well-edited prose crafted with masterful precision, wrapping profound themes in dark humour and emotional authenticity.
Written in English with natural code-switching between English, Nigerian Pidgin, and Igbo, the dialogue is authentic, vibrant, and culturally grounded, capturing the rhythms and inflexions of Nigerian diasporic families without feeling forced or performative.
Onomé’s adult debut weaves a multi-generational saga that feels simultaneously Nigerian Canadian in its specificity and universal in its resonance. Onomé’s characterisation glows throughout. Joy Okafor — the recently divorced life coach who counsels others on boundaries whilst flouting her own — springs from the page with psychological complexity. Her exhaustion and simmering identity crisis anchor an ensemble that includes the religiously zealous Auntie Nancy, the closeted Rob concealing his marriage to Paul, the sanctimonious Nnenna, and the guilt-laden Michael. Each character possesses a distinct voice that resonates authentically.
The dialogue sparks with vitality. Onomé seamlessly braids English, Pidgin, and Igbo into overlapping exchanges that capture the claustrophobic warmth and needle-sharp tensions of sprawling family gatherings. Phrases like “ah-ah,” “wetin na,” and “oya” lend cultural texture whilst remaining accessible, building an immersive experience that never excludes.
What sets this novel apart is its nuanced examination of diaspora identity — Joy’s anxiety that her son Jamil knows more about his Italian heritage than his Nigerian roots, the friction between Western psychology and African spiritualism, the strain of straddling multiple worlds. These intricacies surface through action rather than exposition, particularly during spiritualist Mazi Jaja’s séance, where Christianity blends with Igbo traditionalism, ultimately exposing a family secret that fractures Michael’s sense of belonging.
Onomé’s rendering of grief sidesteps sentimentality. Instead, she portrays it as untidy and achingly human — expressing itself through denial, irritation, and absurdity. When the family awaits Mama Mary’s resurrection at midnight and nothing occurs, the silence says everything. The dark humour never overshadows genuine sorrow; rather, it forges an earned tragicomic register that reflects how actual families navigate loss.
The multi-perspective structure conveys family chaos effectively, though the novel’s scope occasionally produces uneven pacing. Some dialogue-laden scenes retread familiar emotional ground, and the expansive cast can overwhelm. Yet these minor quibbles fade against the novel’s considerable triumphs — particularly in moments like Joy and Michael finally connecting through shared grief, “doing something dumb” together that mends their fractured sibling bond.
Pride and Joy succeeds as both a cultural portrait and a universal narrative. Onomé has fashioned a profoundly human novel that honours the messiness of family whilst posing difficult questions about faith, belonging, and what we owe one another — a stunning debut that positions her as an essential voice in contemporary fiction.
Pride and Joy (literary fiction, 364 pages) by Louisa Onomé. Published in April 2025 by Ouida Books.
Haliru Ali Musa is a Nigerian writer and power engineer. He believes that before problems can be solved, people must first care about them. Whether working on Nigeria’s electrical grid or crafting narratives, his goal remains the same — connecting people to causes that matter. He’s an alumnus of the Nigerian Academy of Letters’ Creative Writing Workshop and the winner of the inaugural Alexander Nderitu Prize for World Literature 2024. He is also the winner of the 8th African Writers Awards (for the Short Story category). His work has appeared in Farafina Blog, Akpata Magazine, The African Griot Review, Naira Stories Magazine, and elsewhere. As a critic and columnist, his weekly column, The Long View, is published every Monday in Naira Stories, and his forthcoming novel is under review by a renowned Nigerian publisher. He lives and writes in Lagos.
