It is the 1970s and a young, university-educated woman called Ezi tries for years to conceive a child with her husband. In her traditional Nigerian Igbo culture, it is the wife's duty to produce children, most importantly a son. When she fails, Ezi's mother-in-law turns against her. Her husband still loves her but is desperate for a male heir. Depressed and restless, Ezi wants to work, but her husband believes her place is in the home, so she spends her days knitting. When she eventually falls pregnant, she is ecstatic. When the child is born, it is a girl. Oh dear. Meanwhile, her husband has been having an affair with their teenage maid, Rapu, who gives birth to his longed-for son. It is expected that Ezi will accept Rapu as her husband's second wife, but she's having none of it and bravely leaves the marriage to raise her daughter alone. This incurs the wrath of everyone, and her parents disown her. The whole family is shamed by association, and Ezi's younger sister will not now be able to find a husband.

The plot, darting back and forth in time, hinges on the fallout of Ezi's rebellion against the cultural norms of her community, especially the impact on her daughter, Adamma. The society they live in privileges men over women, family over individuality, conformity over free will. The price Ezi pays for leaving her husband is to become a pariah. Other women are suspicious of her, rightly worrying about their straying husbands. She initially struggles to earn a living, and as a single woman, cannot secure a bank loan for a business idea. Her daughter Adamma is born into social stigma – a bastard. Other children are forbidden to play with her, and the vivid memory of the taunts she endured in her isolated childhood haunt her into adulthood. "She did not want to remember children yelling 'ada ashawo' – whore's daughter – to her as she walked to school, children not much older than her throwing words like missiles, and laughing as they struck her … She tried to remember her life without tears. She tried not to think of the words flailing in the air and then falling on her back to burn her, her skin welting."

The novel initially focuses on Adamma, aged 22, not long after Ezi's death. Seething with resentment and blame towards her mother, it is only when she reads some of her letters she finds in a shoebox that Ezi's story is revealed. Later, Adamma goes on a journey to find the father she has never known. She hopes one day to be considered respectable enough for marriage, but without a father to give her away or any known relatives, men abandon her. When she ask s her current boyfriend if she can go with him to his family home for Christmas, he replies, "Don't be silly, Mma. Who would I say you were?" Without a father or male guardian, women are nobody.

The second half of the novel has a revitalised energy and pace as it picks up the story of the intriguing character of Rapu, the former uneducated maid. Sold into servitude by her impoverished parents, she has triumphed over her lowly birth and her former mistress. Rapu is a survivor.

Chika Unigwe is one of the most probing, thought-provoking writers of the recent renaissance in African fiction. Many of these are female, bringing hitherto submerged stories about African women to the fore. Unigwe is a Nigerian living in Belgium: her impressive second novel, 2009's On Black Sisters' Street, went behind the scenes of the sex industry to explore the complicated reasons why four African women end up as prostitutes in the red-light district of Antwerp. With Night Dancer, she continues her project of tackling big issues through superb portrayals of complex female characters, and immersing us in the dramas of their lives.

• Bernardine Evaristo's Blonde Roots is published by Penguin.

© The Guardian 2013

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