Gloria Chinyere Okwu’s memoir On Close Examination is now available for preorder from Ouida Books, published under the press’s Cognix imprint. The book traces Chinyere’s life from a childhood split between Jos and Ukpor, where she learns early what Igbo culture demands of a good daughter, through a marriage to escape a domineering father and passive mother, only to find herself trapped with a controlling and abusive husband determined to extinguish her self-worth. Refusing to surrender, she escapes again, rebuilds her life as a single mother of three, fights her way through university, and finally sees a clear path to financial freedom, only for a devastating breast cancer diagnosis to threaten to unravel everything she has built.

The memoir’s weight is amplified by who is telling it. Okwu is the Program Coordinator and Head of Programs at Project PINK BLUE, a leading Nigerian cancer advocacy organization, and a four-time breast cancer survivor in her own right, having undergone four surgeries on the same chest wall over seven years, each time facing a malignant diagnosis. She has spoken publicly about marking the anniversary of her diagnosis each October by sharing her scars and her story, in the hope of helping other survivors embrace theirs and pushing back against the stigma that often surrounds cancer in Nigeria. On Close Examination reads, then, not only as personal history but as an extension of work she has spent years doing in public health spaces; turning private survival into something other women can hold onto.

Raw, unflinching, and deeply human, the memoir promises an account of a Nigerian woman’s resilience and her determination to reclaim her life from every force that has tried to silence it: patriarchal expectation, domestic abuse, illness, and the violence of being told, again and again, who she is allowed to be. At 323 pages, it is positioned as one of Ouida’s more significant nonfiction releases of the year.

On Close Examination is available for preorder now at ouidabooks.com.