Published in 1965, Nigeria was a newly independent nation and this book follows a group of young people as they grapple with questions of how to live their lives. This book is not an act of nation building, as many post independence novels tend to be, but sees characters dealing with situations in which they knowingly or unknowingly deal with life's universal questions: family, marriage, work, politics, religion and death. Death and resurrection hang persistently over the novel and bring a sense of uneasiness about the ancestral past and how to move on with that into the future.