The female authors surveyed in this study - Mariama Ba, Simone Schwartz-Bart, Buchi Emecheta, Beryl Gilroy, Zora Neale Hurston, Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker - are all linked both by their collective use of the trope of abandonment in their literature, symbolic of the Diasporic condition of black people, and by their existentialist depiction of characters who, in contrast with the bad faith of others before the void, are endowed with that special grace' in the face of futile suffering.'