Maame

Let me take you to South London, into the tidy kitchen where Madeleine “Maddie” Wright stands before dawn, packing lunches and setting out her dad’s pills. Maddie’s a dutiful daughter in a Ghanaian British family. Her mother lives half the year in Ghana, her brother floats in and out, and her dad’s Parkinson’s makes everyday tasks unpredictable. So Maddie is the one who steadies the house, even as she tries to begin her own adult life.

When we meet Maddie, she’s stuck in a draining office job where she’s invisible unless someone needs tea. She longs for more—work that uses her brain, a room of her own, a first great love—and gets nudged by a brave thought: maybe she can start living. That impulse sends her into a whirlwind. She’s fired, then hired at a small publishing house. She moves out to a flat in Wandsworth with two new roommates. She meets Ben, a charming banker who cooks like a dream and says all the right things—until intimacy proves painful, and the relationship turns complicated and then cruel. She’s still reeling when the unthinkable happens. Her father dies on his birthday, alone, while Maddie is recovering from a night out she never wanted.

The novel doesn’t look away from the weight of grief—guilt that keeps her up at night, panic that flares at random, and a funeral full of family she barely knows speaking Twi she wishes she could. But it also shows what holds a person up: a best friend who rushes over with food and time; a wise, straight-talking therapist who shares Maddie’s Ghanaian roots; and, later, a gentler relationship with Sam, a patient artist who listens, slows down, and lets her body and heart set the pace. Work becomes a proving ground too. When her ideas are quietly lifted in meetings, Maddie learns to speak up, to ask for a seat at the table—and keep it.

There are revelations at home: her mother’s arranged marriage, the braided loyalties across two continents, a complicated love that never matched the stories. There’s unexpected mercy: an inheritance her father left only to her, a recognition of the years she carried him and everyone else. And there is the quiet, steady act of choosing herself—moving in with her best friend, writing honestly, visiting the grave with updates like voicemails to heaven.

This is a story about becoming “Maame”—a Twi name that can mean woman, mother, caretaker—on your own terms. It’s about the kinds of strength that don’t show up on Instagram. It’s about how love can be tender, and sex can be safe, and work can be fair when you insist on it. Most of all, it’s about the power—and mess—of growing into a life that feels like yours.

• Listeners who love character-driven fiction about family, identity, and coming of age
• Readers navigating grief, burnout, or caregiving who want a story that understands the body as well as the heart
• Anyone who enjoys warm, witty contemporary novels with cultural depth, romance, and real growth

Jessica George was born and raised in London to Ghanaian parents and studied English literature at the University of Sheffield. She worked in a literary agency and at a theater before joining the editorial team at Bloomsbury UK. Maame is her debut novel.