Chika Unigwe’s Grace, published by Canongate earlier this year, has sold translation rights to publishers in Russia and Slovenia, the author announced on Facebook this week. Unigwe expressed gratitude to the rights department at Canongate, her editor, her agent, and the translators who will carry the novel into new languages, writing that she is excited for the book to reach readers in languages she could never hope to master herself.

The novel follows Grace, an outwardly successful midwife whose carefully built life is shadowed by a teenage pregnancy she was pressured to give up decades earlier. The book is set in 2020 during the height of the COVID pandemic and opens in Enugu, where Grace runs a maternity home and is respected in her marriage, her church, and her community, even as the novel gradually reveals what that respectability has cost her. As Masobe Books, the novel’s Nigerian publisher, put it when the cover was unveiled earlier this year, the story follows Grace on her first-born daughter Baby’s birthday, a child she hasn’t seen in twenty-six years, as her estranged mother’s reappearance threatens the fragile life Grace has spent decades building.

Grace has drawn strong critical notice on this side of the Atlantic. In her review for Brittle Paper, editor Ainehi Edoro called the novel “a feminist dictionary of mothering,” praising the way Unigwe refuses to let readers settle into easy judgment of any single mother in the book. Edoro noted that the novel resists conventional moral frameworks by surrounding Grace with too many other mothers, each shaped by different pressures, for blame to land squarely on any one of them. She also singled out Unigwe’s prose style, observing that the book’s spare, economical writing recalls Chinua Achebe’s ability to conjure whole emotional and social worlds from just a few well-chosen details.

The Russian and Slovenian deals extend a growing international footprint for the novel, which had already found its way into Nigerian bookstores through Masobe Books‘ March release before catching the attention of Canongate’s international rights team. For a story so rooted in the particulars of Enugu and the weight of Igbo family expectation, its migration into new linguistic and cultural terrain feels, as Unigwe herself suggested, like its own small act of grace.

Unigwe is the author of several previous novels, including On Black Sisters’ Street and Night Dancer, and Gracecontinues her long-standing interest in the costs women pay to survive systems that offer them little real choice. No release dates for the Russian or Slovenian editions have yet been announced.