SO LONG A LETTER, translated by Modupé Bodé-Thomas

134pp., paperback, Reprint, Black Sea Books and Head of Zeus, London, (1981) 2024

ISBN: 9781035906062

First published in French in 1979.

Winner of the 1980 Noma Award for Publishing in Africa.

Set in Senegal and written as an extended letter to a lifelong friend, So Long a Letter records a recently widowed Muslim schoolteacher's struggles after her husband betrayed their marriage by taking a second wife.

“...a timeless classic of African literature. Bâ brings the issue of polygamy into sharp, almost familiar focus for readers who might think it bizarre and safely foreign.” Catherine E. Bolten, University of Notre Dame

"The most deeply felt presentation of the female condition in African fiction." Professor Abiola Irele, author of The African Imagination: Literature in Africa and the Black Diaspora

Mariama Bâ (1929–1981) was a Senegalese author and feminist. Born in Dakar, she was raised a Muslim. Bâ died before the publication of her second novel, Un Chant écarlate, translated into English as Scarlet Song.