NIGHTBLOOM

345pp., paperback, London, 2023

"In her second novel, Nightbloom, Peace Adzo Medie uses the metaphor of financial debt and its collection to describe the domestic disputes and traumas within a trans-Atlantic clan that stretches from provincial Ghana to the capital, Accra, to the suburbs of Washington, D.C ... The novel is narrated first by Akorfa and then by Selasi, two cousins born on the same day in 1985 in Ghana. Telling the stories of their parallel arcs from childhood to adulthood — both build successful careers and marry loving, accomplished men — the women offer two different versions of a single shared history." The New York Times

"Nightbloom is a book about secrets; not just the ones passed between sister-cousins giggling in the dark, but the kinds our families require us to keep, the ones that reshape the landscape of who we become. In this stunning novel, Akorfa and Selasi share common wounds inflicted by the same adults who have vowed to care for them, but those wounds wield drastically different results in each woman. In these pages, Medie has achieved a symphonic feat, weaving a delicate narrative of multivocal familial history, where sameness and difference, sisterhood and division, salve and destruction walk hand in hand on a journey that feels both achingly familiar in its scope, yet fresh and utterly new in its telling.” Destiny O. Birdsong, author of Nobody’s Magic

Ghanaian writer Peace Adzo Medie is Senior Lecturer in Gender and International Politics at the University of Bristol. She is the author of Global Norms and Local Action: the campaigns to end violence against women in Africa (2020). Her debut novel, His Only Wife, was published in 2020 .