Fiction
The Lagoon Keeps Its Own
A novel
A coastal town gives up its daughters to the water and calls it tradition. One woman comes back to ask the lagoon for a name.
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About the book
About the book
Every generation, the lagoon takes someone. The town has a word for it, a song for it, and a season for it; and no one has ever written the names down.
The Lagoon Keeps Its Own is a novel about the stories a place tells to survive itself, and the woman who decides that survival is not the same as truth.
Why I wrote it
Why I wrote it
I grew up beside water that everyone spoke to and no one questioned. This book is my questioning, done late and with love.
Inside
What you'll find inside
- 01A novel told across three Harmattans and one flood
- 02A chorus of women who remember what the record does not
- 03An ending that returns to the water on its own terms
Excerpt
An excerpt
The water did not rise so much as lean in, the way an aunt leans in to tell you something she has decided you are finally old enough to carry.
They said her mother walked out at dusk and the lagoon kept her. They said it the way people say the weather.
Reader notes
The Lagoon Keeps Its Own is the kind of novel that begins as a mystery and slowly reveals itself as something much larger: a story about what families inherit, what cultures remember, what development destroys, and what it means to finally choose what you owe.
Belinda Dei
People & Culture Officer
Author's note
I wrote most of this at dusk, which is the only hour the lagoon in my head behaves.
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