Coconut
A Black Girl Fostered by a White Family in the 1960s and Her Search for Belonging and Identity
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Narrated by:
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Adjoa Andoh
About this listen
Narrated by Adjoa Andoh and featured on the Graham Norton Book Club
"Why am I not White like everybody else?"
Nan came and sat on the edge of my bed. "What do you mean?" A tender finger brushed against my cheek.
"Well, everyone in this house is white. Why am I Black?"
A generation of Nigerian children were born in Britain in the '50s and '60s, privately fostered by white families, then taken to Nigeria by their parents.
Coconut is the story of one of those children.
1963, North London. Nan fosters one-year-old Florence Olajide and calls her "Ann". Florence adores her foster mother more than anything but Nan, and the children around her, all have white skin, and she can’t help but feel different. Then, four years later, after a weekend visit to her birth parents, Florence never returns to Nan. Two months after, sandwiched between her mother and father plus her three siblings, six-year-old Florence steps off a ship in Lagos to the fierce heat of the African sun.
Swapping the lovely, comfortable bed in her room at Nan’s for a mat on the floor of the living room in her new home, Florence finds herself struggling to adjust. She wants to embrace her cultural heritage but doesn’t speak Yoruba and knows nothing of the customs. Clashes with her grandmother, Mama, the matriarch of the family, result in frequent beatings. Torn between her early childhood experiences and the expectations of her African culture, she begins to question who she is. Nigerian, British, both?
Florence’s story is a tale of loss and loneliness, surviving poverty, maltreatment, and fighting to get an education. Most of all, it’s a moving, uplifting, and inspiring account of one woman’s self-determination to discover who she is and find her way to a place she can call home. Perfect for fans of Lemn Sissay’s My Name Is Why and Tara Westover’s Educated.
©2021 Florence Ọlájídé (P)2021 Thread, an imprint of Storyfire Ltd.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"Extraordinarily moving...a stunning read, beautifully written with searing honesty and humor about the complexities of race and identity, about culture and belonging, about the discernible quest for self-discovery. This is a testimony of faith, resilience, and determination, a wonderful achievement." (Abi Daré, international best-selling author of The Girl with the Louding Voice)
"A piece of poetic resilience, Coconut is an integral intervention in our understanding of race, identity and belonging. (David Lammy, politician)
"I found myself completely immersed from the start! Florence writes with honesty, beauty and courage…delving deeply into some of the most important issues of our times." (Christy Lefteri, international best-selling author of The Beekeeper of Aleppo)
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For 46 years, Carol Minto has quietly gone about her life, carrying with her the most extraordinary and heartbreaking secrets. In The Asylum, Carol tells the full story of how she overcame unimaginable suffering, to find the happiness and solace she has today as a mother and grandmother.
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Couldn’t stop listening
- By Tonya Copeland-Stone on 06-12-22
By: Ann Cusack - contributor, and others
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Black Sunday
- A Novel
- By: Tola Rotimi Abraham
- Narrated by: Liz Femi, Dele Ogundiran, Miebaka Yohannes, and others
- Length: 7 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Twin sisters Bibike and Ariyike are enjoying a relatively comfortable life in Lagos in 1996. Then their mother loses her job due to political strife, and the family, facing poverty, is drawn into the New Church, an institution led by a charismatic pastor who is not shy about worshipping earthly wealth. Soon Bibike and Ariyike's father wagers the family home on a sure bet that evaporates like smoke.
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Good Story - Awful accents
- By Tamara C-J on 02-15-21
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The Chief Witness
- Escape from China's Modern-Day Concentration Camps
- By: Sayragul Sauytbay, Alexandra Cavelius
- Narrated by: Xifeng Brooks
- Length: 9 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Born in China’s northwestern province, Sayragul Sauytbay trained as a doctor before being appointed a senior civil servant. But her life was upended when the Chinese authorities incarcerated her. Her crime? Being Kazakh, one of China’s ethnic minorities. The northwestern province borders the largest number of foreign nations and is the point in China that is the closest to Europe. In recent years, it has become home to more than 1,200 penal camps - modern-day gulags that are estimated to house three million members of the Kazakh and Uyghur minorities.
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A Must Read!
- By Stephanie on 12-22-21
By: Sayragul Sauytbay, and others
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In the Time of Our History
- By: Susanne Pari
- Narrated by: Mozhan Marnò
- Length: 11 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Twelve months after her younger sister Anahita's death, Mitra Jahani reluctantly returns to her parents' home in suburban New Jersey to observe the Iranian custom of "The One Year." Ana is always in Mitra's heart, though they chose very different paths. While Ana, sweet and dutiful, bowed to their domineering father's demands and married, Mitra rebelled, and was banished.
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Enjoyable
- By J. E. Jordan on 05-23-23
By: Susanne Pari
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The Parted Earth
- By: Anjali Enjeti
- Narrated by: Deepti Gupta
- Length: 7 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Spanning more than half a century and cities from New Delhi to Atlanta, Anjali Enjeti’s debut is a heartfelt and human portrait of the long shadow of the partition of the Indian subcontinent on the lives of three generations.
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Riveting
- By MSE on 05-14-21
By: Anjali Enjeti
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The Bermondsey Bookshop
- By: Mary Gibson
- Narrated by: Anne Dover
- Length: 13 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Set in 1920s London, this is the inspiring story of Kate Goss' struggle against poverty, hunger and cruel family secrets. Her mother died in a fall, her father has vanished without trace, and now her aunt and cousins treat her viciously. In a freezing, vermin-infested garret, factory girl Kate has only her own brave spirit and dreams of finding her father to keep her going. She has barely enough money to feed herself, or to pay the rent. The factory where she works begins to lay off people and it isn't long before she has fallen into the hands of the violent local money-lender.
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A glimpse into the past
- By Luci-Lu on 10-27-21
By: Mary Gibson
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The Secret Life of Sunflowers
- By: Marta Molnar, Dana Marton
- Narrated by: Kendra Murray
- Length: 9 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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When Hollywood auctioneer Emsley Wilson finds her famous grandmother's diary while cleaning out her New York brownstone, the pages are full of surprises. The first surprise is, the diary isn't her grandmother's. It belongs to Johanna Bonger, Vincent van Gogh's sister-in-law.
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Nothing like a expected…
- By LOVETOQUILT on 05-06-23
By: Marta Molnar, and others
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The Convent
- The Shocking True Story of Surviving and Evil Nun's Care Home from Hell
- By: Marie Hargreaves
- Narrated by: Dorothy Lawrence
- Length: 8 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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When a fancy car pulls up outside six-year-old Marie's home in 1959, her dad tells her she is going on holiday. But little does she know she will not see her home again for four long years. Her family cannot afford to keep her at home. Marie tells the story of how she was taken away from a poor but happy and loving home life to live in a convent - away from everyone and everything she holds dear. Her hair is bluntly chopped, her clothes are taken away and her name is changed. Then a horrific ritual of physical, sexual and mental abuse begins.
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Stunning Book
- By madameEmily on 10-09-21
By: Marie Hargreaves
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The Secret Orphan
- A historical novel full of secrets
- By: Glynis Peters
- Narrated by: Anna Cordell
- Length: 10 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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As the Nazis’ relentless bombs fall during the Blitz of Coventry, six-year-old Rose Sherbourne finds herself orphaned and under the guardianship of a Cornish farmer's daughter, Elenor Cardew. Elenor knows that the only way to protect spirited Rose is to leave the city and make a new life for themselves away from harm. But soon Elenor discovers that Hitler’s firestorm is not the only thing she must fear when she learns a devastating secret about Rose....
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Am I missing something?
- By Linda Suzuki on 12-05-19
By: Glynis Peters
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Secret Daughter
- By: Shilpi Somaya Gowda
- Narrated by: Soneela Nankani
- Length: 11 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Debut novelist Shilpi Somaya Gowda pens this compelling tale about two families, worlds apart, linked by one Indian child. After giving birth to a girl for a second time, impoverished Kavita must give her up to an orphanage. The baby, named Asha, is adopted by an American doctor and raised in California. But once grown, Asha decides to return to India.
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A Must Read
- By Stephanie on 06-08-11
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Say I'm Dead
- A Family Memoir of Race, Secrets, and Love
- By: E. Dolores Johnson
- Narrated by: Allyson Johnson
- Length: 7 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Fearful of prison time - or lynching - for violating Indiana’s anti-miscegenation laws in the 1940s, E. Dolores Johnson's Black father and White mother fled Indianapolis to secretly marry in Buffalo. Her mother simply vanished, evading an FBI and police search that ended with the declaration to her family that she was the victim of foul play, either dead or sold into white slavery.
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Deeply meaningful important read
- By A.M.Rousseau on 12-21-21
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After the Last Border
- Two Families and the Story of Refuge in America
- By: Jessica Goudeau
- Narrated by: Soneela Nankani
- Length: 13 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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The welcoming and acceptance of immigrants and refugees have been central to America's identity for centuries - yet America has periodically turned its back in times of the greatest humanitarian need. After the Last Border is an intimate look at the lives of two women as they struggle for the 21st-century American dream, having won the "golden ticket" to settle as refugees in Austin, Texas.
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Great Content. Odd Structure.
- By Susan Stillings on 02-10-21
By: Jessica Goudeau
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The Home
- By: Karen Osman
- Narrated by: Imogen Church
- Length: 10 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Angela was just a baby when she was abandoned, and a children's home is no place to grow up. When manager Ray takes girls off to his 'den' in the garden, they always come back crying.... So, when wealthy couple James and Rosemary come to choose a child to adopt, Angela is desperate to escape. Years later, Angela starts to search for her birth mother, Evelyn, hoping to heal the scars of her childhood. But strange and sinister events start to unfold. And Evelyn fears she may not survive her daughter's return.
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Did not see the twist coming
- By Michelle Yaple on 08-20-19
By: Karen Osman
What listeners say about Coconut
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Buretto
- 05-24-22
More personal memoir, thin as a social document
I bought this book expecting it to be an inspiration story of a woman grappling with identity, torn between two cultures and finding a way to rise above the fray. I'm sure the author would claim that is the case, however I found it to be lacking. I really wanted to like it, but as time went on, with little more than stories of childhood in Britain and Nigeria, it became clear that any conflict and resolution would be very slight indeed.
To its credit, the book did give a detailed account of growing up in Nigeria, more specifically in Yoruba culture. That was new to me, and I found it to be enlightening. To the extent that it demonstrated the issues involved for a Black child growing up in Nigeria with an early British upbringing, it was also educational, if not entirely comprehensive.
Where the book falls down is the author's lack of self-awareness as she's touting (rather immodestly, it has to be said) her search for self-awareness. I would never minimize or in any way deny accounts of racism, but for 90% of the book the examples are speculative (by her own admission) or anecdotal. The issues with British bureaucracy and passport control are certainly true and a stain on the nation, but only marginally mentioned. While the author is struggling with her own identity, nationally and culturally, she manages to broadly paint innocent questions and comments (perhaps uncomfortable and showing poor form, and mostly from children) as micro-aggressions about her heritage. Yet she rarely recognizes the fact that this curiosity is coming from sources massively less informed about her unique upbringing, that even she doesn't fully understand. It'd almost be enough to make your feel for her, but as time went on, I felt less and less sympathetic. To be fair, in the last 45 minutes to an hour the book starts to hit its stride, but by that time I'd started clock watching. Too little, too late. Too self-aggrandizing to be likable, yet not strident enough to garner respect. Overall, just a disappointment. Tempted to give 2s, but the core theme is important, and the performance of voices was excellent.
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- CRAIG FASHORO
- 08-19-21
Highly recommended-Must read
Not only a wonderful well written story but also a must read for anyone interested in or in need of some understanding when it comes to cross cultural relations. Well done. Comment by Eileen Fashoro
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- Tina
- 03-15-23
Entertaining and compelling autobiography
Poignant and well written autobiography. Wonderful comparison between British and Nigerian cultures.
I listen to a lot of Audiobooks, and this is one of the best readers I have heard.
She really brought the characters to life and did a great job doing both Nigerian and British accents! One of the best books I have read, and I read a lot of books!
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