Abiku

When Eni Webb's second son dies young, as her first son died before him, the state begins asking questions she cannot answer in any language it will accept.More than a century earlier, in colonial Nigeria, Cecily Ashford-Crane watches her husband interrupt a ceremony she only half understands for a child she has no right to name. What she witnesses does not end with her. It moves through daughters, through silence, and through the body itself.Moving between colonial Nigeria and contemporary South London, Àbíkú is a haunting literary novel about grief, inheritance, maternal lineage, and the histories that remain alive beneath the surfaces we make. As archives open, family stories resurface, and an old pattern tightens once more around the living, Eni must confront what has followed her bloodline across generations—and whether love, witness, and right knowledge can finally bring an unfinished account to rest.