Esthers’s stunning debut, off-handedly ‘edgy-tender’ style caught me from the first page. Her sentences were seductive — and at the same time she told an achingly compelling story systematically scrutinizing the challenges of migration…..enlarging the emotional profundity observations of cultural discordance, family, love, loss, grief, guilt, ambition, and the struggle of belonging.

The psychological depth plucks the raw nerves of complexities, of messiness, of self-doubt, guilt, unworthiness, the forbidden, the loneliness and sadness.
Esther Ifesinachi’s lifelike quality dialogue felt unerring, emphasizing real probabilities of ‘telling-it-like-it-is’.
It was easy to get involved with the characters and their struggles.

Sommy, a Nigerian woman just arrived in the United States airport — greeted by her apartment-mate, Bayo (also an immigrant from Nigeria). They had never met in person until this moment. Arrangements and agreements had been made online ahead of time. Both sharing their half of the rent.
“Sommy swipes beads of sweat from her forehead. She did not anticipate the heat. She always associated America with the cold”.
“They walk on ahead. The air smells clean. The sky, clear like an overshine window. Unlike Lagos’s gray sky and fogged air. It occurs to her then that she’s indeed landed. She is in America. She wants to throw her arms around.Bayo, say to him: ‘We are here, we are here’. But it passes, the giddiness, as swiftly as it came”.
Actually it only took minutes until Sommy had deep reservations about Bayo’s boisterous personality.

Sommy came to the United States for graduate school…..leaving Nigeria, only two weeks after her brother, Mezie attempted suicide. The guilt of leaving her brother behind and feeling uprooted and out of place herself made Sommy anxious-off balanced.

Life gets more and more complicated for Sommy between her University classes, Bayo (supposedly ‘just’ her roommate), and another love interest named Bryan. (a biracial American).

Before Sommy and Bryan journey to Lagos, Nigeria during their summer break and face a harrowing blow….which causes Sommy to closely examine herself and choices…..
….I was impressed with Sommy’s self-observations she was making from other students in her literature classes.
“It seems always like a contest of literacy, all of them trying to outshine the next person. If someone mentions Tolstoy, the next person mentions Dostoevsky, and the other person then reaches further down history to excavate an older Russian, say Pushkin. They go round and round until somehow, they arrive back in the same twenty-first century, where this critic has written a not so refined essay on the latest successful commercial novel”.
“The essay reads like a Goodreads review, someone would scoff. No one brings rigor to critical analysis anymore, another would add.
Around the fifth week of this semester, Sommy find herself wanting desperately to be part of this club. It’s why she left home. To do something with herself. To find her passion. She wants, too, to reference Russian writers as though she’s read them all her life. She wants it to be worthy of the sacrifice of leaving Mezie behind”.

“It’s the same in Modern Loneliness, her favorite of the three classes, where she’d taken a small comfort in the stories of loneliness, her classmates shared. They all felt isolated. Why? They couldn’t say. Social media, they postulated. The rise of diet culture, productivity, culture, the ‘do better, be better’ culture. They blame capitalism and racism and
neoliberalism. They blamed poverty. They blamed the president of the university and the president of the United States. They blamed the United Nations and the Red Cross. Sommy left every class feeling guiltless, able to pin her roving acrid sadness to the external cause. But when the nadir arrives, it eclipses everything, and even in this class, where she had formerly felt solidarity, she wants to scream; she wants to say,
‘Everyone, shut up, shut up, please, shut up’”.

“The Tiny Things Are Heavier” is a beautifully-written literary poignant novel.
Sorrowful and hopeful …. it’s emotionally powerful and affecting.
Congratulations to Esther Ifesinachi Okonkwo (terrific debut; talents galore).