Madeleine Wright (or “Maddie” to her British friends and “Maame” to her Ghanaian family) is a timid and diligent young woman, paradoxically wise beyond her years, yet simultaneously sheltered and innocent in so many ways. At 25, Maddie can count her friend group on one hand and feels like she’s decades behind her peers, who all seem to be cohabiting with romantic partners or roommates, traveling, and enjoying active social lives. She, on the other hand, still lives at home and follows a strict and uneventful routine, taking the same bus each morning to a job that only pays the bills and promptly returning home at day’s end to eat the same meals for dinner—like a reluctant, much younger, Black female analog of Stranger Than Fiction’s Harold Crick.

Awaiting her at home is her beloved father, whose Parkinson’s has left him incapacitated and in need of permanent in-home care, which Maddie manages with the assistance of her father’s nurse, Dawoud. Maddie’s older brother James lives elsewhere and spends most of his time working and traveling for his entertainment job. Although their parents remain married, they live apart: their father resides in the UK, while their mother mainly spends her time tending to their late grandfather’s business in Ghana. She only visits the family home in London sporadically, a pattern begun during Maddie and James’s childhood. While usually physically absent, she always manages a way to be present in other ways, namely by keeping frequent tabs on Maddie’s conduct.

Maddie tightly guards her family’s unconventional dynamics, her father’s deteriorating health, and her role as his primary caregiver, afraid to expose her Ghanaian family’s private affairs to her British friends and colleagues because, as her mother warns her, they couldn’t possibly understand. Temperamentally introverted and desirous to please her parents, Maddie has for years accepted her mother’s reasoning as a guiding principle, though lately she’s been unable to shake a deep sense of isolation and sadness. She longs to break out of her bubble and confide in someone; she yearns for more but doesn’t feel free or know how to obtain it.

When her mother unexpectedly proposes an extended stay in the UK to relieve her of some of her caretaking responsibilities, Maddie begins to give the notion of moving out some serious consideration. Surprising herself, she searches for apartments and excitedly crafts a bucket-list of all the new experiences she hopes to have as “The New Maddie.” On her own for the first time, Maddie starts to go after a more satisfying career path, adapt to living with strangers, be more spontaneous and socially uninhibited, embrace her sexuality, experience the joys and travails of dating, and find her voice. Through personal triumphs, many mistakes, and family tragedies, Maddie comically stumbles along with winsome determination as she learns countless lessons, including the vicissitudes of love and invaluable measure of having and leaning on chosen families.

Jessica George’s humor shines so clearly through Maddie. Maddie’s introspection, complex family history and dynamics, and sometimes clumsy quest for selfhood while bearing the cumbersome weight of her family’s fraught world on her shoulders, are uncomfortably relatable and so beautifully rendered. A charming and crushingly joyful read.

LOGLINE: A warmhearted and inexperienced 25-year-old British Ghanaian woman who spends her days at a job she dreads and her evenings in her childhood home caring for her ailing father, seizes an unexpected opportunity to finally start living life on her own terms. 

MOOD: A fresh and heartbreakingly funny bildungsroman of an endearing, singular voice that reads like a cross between Michaela Coel’s “Chewing Gum” and Talia Hibbert’s Get a Life, Chloe Brown with the guileless spirit, delightful nerdiness, and loveable messiness of the Mindy Kaling-produced “Never Have I Ever.” Maddie Wright is the second-generation West African, socially awkward, and bookish late-bloomer I didn’t know I needed as a heroine.

TITLE: Maame

AUTHOR: Jessica George

GENRE: Literary, Contemporary Fiction, Adult Coming-of-Age, Families, Women’s Fiction, Humor

LENGTH: 322 pages 

PUBLISHER: Hodder & Stoughton, an imprint of Hachette UK (orig. publisher); St. Martin’s Press (US publisher)

PUB DATE: 14 February 2023 (UK publication); 31 January 2023 (US publication)

ADAPTATION: To be adapted for television by Universal International Studios