“The last arc ended in water, wings and hooves and two babies born at the edge of the world. This one opens on open grassland, smoke from dung fires, and the wary eyes of people who have no word for archangel but know a god-shaped thing when they see one. Elena and Mikhail arrive in…
Tag: Romance
Hollandé – When the Fouta Highlands Borrow Your Home’s Name
On the dusty road into Guinea’s Fouta Djallon, a battered Peugeot and a smiling taxi driver quietly weld Elena’s Dutch past to the West African highlands. When he calls the mountains “Hollandé” in Pular, the word suddenly makes her feel less like a foreigner and more like someone whose old home and new road have collided for a moment in the same name.
SIRA: The Swahili Word That Changed How I Write About Memory
Field Notes from Dar es Salaam — Behind the Scenes Sira — the path that was always meant for your feet. There are words that stop you mid-sentence when you first hear them. Sira. Kiswahili for biography — but not the kind you find in a library. Not chronology, not curriculum vitae. The path itself,…
Fieldwork at the Crossroads: Vodun, Twins, and a Wolf in Cotonou
Field notes from editing Book V, Part III The Kivuko Chronicles, of The Memory Cartographer. This week I’m deep in the opening of Book V, Part III of The Memory Cartographer: Elena six months pregnant in Cotonou, trying very hard to pretend this is still just “fieldwork.” Breakfast at the Sofitel, security logistics, anthropologist armour firmly in…
The Memory Cartographer
The Alkebulan Chronicles — Book V is published The Memory Cartographer · Book V · Part I. The Mauritanian desert, a ruined well, gunfire, and a pack of wolves materialising out of the dark. Elena is running. She is also, as it happens, four months pregnant. One by one they emerge — fantastic shapes, silver…
The Memory Cartographer
Book V Part I The Alkebulan Chronicles The car rattles to a gentle stop, dust swirling in the late-day sun. Beyond the windshield: the barren edge of the border crossing, a horizon line between worlds. Karim turns to me, expression suddenly serious. “Elena. From here on, you’ll need to pose as my wife.” I arch…
The Goldfall Chronicles
Excerpt Book IV – Part III Elena Delange is back in London. What happens next, she did not see coming. The room freezes. Every eye flicks to my silk blouse, where delicate streaks of gold crawl down from my breasts, catching the overhead light. “You must be kidding me,” I snap. “Of all the moments,…
The Holographer’s Atlas
Richard Costa Blanca, 2012 Coffee with Irmy and Hans, the neighbours. Stroopwafels, Dutch television, the particular furniture of people who brought their country with them intact. I was comfortable in that atmosphere the way you’re comfortable in a language you grew up in but no longer speak every day. The doorbell announced a bridge friend…
The Memory Cartographer – Book X – Order Magic
Another sneak peek The Line That Did Not Move Three men. Maybe four. Poorly disciplined — the kind who expect sleeping villages and easy work. They had good intelligence and bad instincts. They knew about the fund, the women, the maps. They knew a foreign woman with money was somewhere inside the compound. They thought…
The Memory Cartographer – Book X – Order Magic
First pages sneak peek Every Girl Born Knowing Years ago I wrote a column about a Global Birth Right Fund. The idea was simple and radical in equal measure: every girl born anywhere on earth enters the world with an economic right. A fund, seeded by women with money who were tired of reading about…
The Memory Cartographer 