The Girl with the Louding Voice

The Girl with the Louding Voice is a coming-of-age novel and the debut of the Nigerian writer Abi Dare, published in 2020. It is narrated in the voice of Adunni, a teenage girl from a village in Nigeria who becomes a housemaid in Lagos.

Adunni's mother told her that an education was the thing that would let her speak for herself, and after her mother's death her father arranges a marriage for her instead. What follows is a series of placements: a household in the village, then a house in Lagos where she is treated as property, and eventually a position that gives her a route back to school. The novel is written in Adunni's own English, which is not the standard written form, and that voice is the reason the book is remembered.

Dare writes a first-person account with almost no distance between the narrator and the reader, and the plot turns on the practical obstacles in the way of a girl who has been told she has no voice.