His Only Wife is a book written in this vein. Fiction that conveys the sounds, colors, and smells of the world around me, and illustrates life’s beauty, ugliness, complexities, and contradictions. Since then, I’ve written fiction that reflects my surroundings. But now I know it’s because I was writing the kind of stories I read. While it received some praise, one of my readers wanted to know why I had chosen to write a book set in California where none of the characters looked or sounded like me. I wrote a book-length story in my early teens and gave it to friends and a few adults to read. The characters skied, though I had not yet seen snow, and celebrated Halloween and Thanksgiving, despite these festivities being foreign to me. And since the books available to me as a young reader were book series like Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, Famous Five, and Sweet Valley Twins, I thought my stories had to be set in Europe and the United States, even though I hadn’t been to these places. I believed that to enjoy my stories, they had to be similar to the ones I was reading. I wrote because I ran out of books to read and, unwilling to wait for new books, decided to write them myself. I began writing fiction in Ghana when I was about ten.
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