So Long a Letter

Mariama Ba 1979

Devastation Rating

Emotionally Ruined
injustice friendship literary fiction loss

Our Take

A Senegalese woman writes to her lifelong friend after her husband takes a second wife and the letter becomes a reckoning with everything her society has asked women to accept. Ba writes grief and fury in the same register: quiet, controlled, devastating. The friendship between the two women is the real love story.

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