It’s the action that sets off the corporeal and mental movement of the rest of the characters-his Nigerian-born wife Fola and four Boston-born, overachieving children: Olu, twins Kehinde and Taiwo, and Sadé, called Sadie. The patriarch of this family and story, Kweku Sai, of Ghana, is promptly introduced in the first sentence by the announcement of his death. Enter tragedy starting with the title, which refers to the mass expulsions of African immigrants in Ghana and Nigeria in the 1960s and 1980s, respectively. Ghana Must Go is a mostly well-written, occasionally devastating first attempt from an author who pondered the specifics of the African immigrant experience in her 2005 article “Bye-Bye Barbar” on the rise of the “Afropolitan”: interracial, interethnic, international. The immigration narrative is one of movement and ascension, running toward fantasy from nightmare, or in some cases, opportunity to opportunity as privilege is gained or lost.

Setting much of the plot in Ghana Must Go-Taiye Selasi’s engaging first novel about two African immigrants and their children-in Boston was an clever choice: A hilly colony established by English immigrants fleeing religious restrictions, now teeming with people from all over the world who go to the universities, drive cabs, open restaurants (or serve in them), build grassroots organizations, and work, clean or are treated at the hospitals buy the homes, pay the taxes and gripe about the T and, in quiet moments, agonize about their fears and desires.

Ghana must go by taiye selasi