Up in arms against her family and the whole petite bourgeois lifestyle in the provincial city of Caen, Hortense decides to leave it all behind. Fascinated by Africa, she heads for a film festival in Ouagadougou. Freed from her past, she opens her eyes and notices everything. She meets Seydou, the poet of Kermassar. And falls immediately, irrevocably in love.
Her whole life is thrown into a tailspin. Just a few days later, Hortense follows Seydou to Kermassar, a village by the sea. He wants to marry her. So she has to convert to Islam and become Asha. Not only that, but she is going to be his second wife. The first one’s name is Awa; she’s pregnant, and about to give birth.
Blessed with a sharply lucid eye, the author analyzes Seydou and his two wives’ feelings, and shows how Senegalese women live their married lives, portraying African polygamy in all its complexity, from the inside.
A first novel full of adventure, love, hate and violence, Second Wife is truly charming as it describes the story of a passionate love – that was hard to accept.

Diary of an African passion. She’s 27 and white. He’s black, a poet and already married, and he asks her to be his second spouse. A story in which scandal meets passionate love and romanticism is intertwined with cruelty.