Published in paperback 21st Marsh 2024 by Oneworld.
From the cover of the book:
AKORFA AND SELASI WERE ONCE INSEPARABLE. NOW, THEY MUST REPAIR THEIR BROKEN RELATIONSHIP OR LOSE EACH OTHER FOREVER.Growing up in the same small Ghanaian town, Selasi and Akorfa were more than just cousins, they were best friends. The girls shared everything: their dreams, their desires, their every secret. But as they enter their teens Selasi begins to change, until Akorfa barely recognises the sullen, withdrawn girl she once knew so well.
Years go by before they cross paths again, and their lives look very different now. Although they are separated by continents, they have each found success in their careers: Akorfa works in international development in the US; Selasi is a restaurateur running the hottest spot in Accra. It takes a crisis to pull them back together, forcing both women to confront shocking secrets and childhood trauma that neither one has been willing to address. Now they must bridge the gulf between them to stop history repeating itself.
From the author of Reese's Book Club pick His Only Wife, Nightbloom is a powerful story about female friendship, the relationships that shape us and the people we never quite leave behind.
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Cousins Akorfa and Selasi grew up in the same small town in Ghana. With mothers who were best friends, it was almost inevitable that they would become inseparable, but a friendship that seemed unbreakable was eventually torn asunder by difficult family circumstances.
As the years go by, the two women follow separate paths in marriage, motherhood, and their careers - Akorfa in international development in the USA, and Selasi as a successful restaurant owner in Accra. Their lives seem as far apart as the miles that divide them, but when Akorfa's father dies, she returns home to Ghana and unexpectedly bumps into Selasi. It is a meeting that provokes a bitter outburst of recriminations, and forces them to confront the secrets that bind them.
Nightbloom is a powerful and thought-provoking novel that has quite rightly earned its place among the longlisted titles of this year's Women's Prize for Fiction. The story unfurls in a very clever way, starting with Akorfa's narrative in the first half of the book, and then flipping perspective to Selasi's point of view for the second half. This deliberately leads you down a path of looking at their relationship in a particular way, before everything gets tipped on its head in a 'there are two sides to every story' kind of way.
Medie's writing is a delight, and she examines a spectacular array of themes around different facets of power, responsibility, prejudice, systemic racism, corruption, and culture shock through the stories of these two women, via intelligent plotlines far too complex to delve into in a short review - especially given their geographical locations in societies that are both broken in a number of profound ways.
But what really pulls you into this novel, and keeps you turning the pages all the way to surprise conclusion, is how Medie writes about the far more intimate details of the shifting relationship between the two women. She beautifully explores how the tangled threads of close female friendship can be divided by complicated family dynamics and the rawness of perceived slights, and then bound tightly back together by shared experiences of trauma.
This is a fascinating book, full of cultural detail about Ghana. Medie immerses you completely in the lives of each of these women in turn and leaves you to make up your own mind about the rights and wrongs of their actions and what happened between them, although it is Selasi's astonishing strength of character that shines out for me.
Like any book that addresses weighty issues there are no easy answers when it comes to the shape of the future they face at its conclusion, but I think Medie makes the right choices about where this story goes, and she leaves you with some interesting things to ponder about fighting against pressure to remain silent about abuse and corruption. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Nightbloom is available to buy now in hardcover, ebook and audio formats.
Thank you to Oneworld for sending me a copy of this book in return for an honest review.
About the author:
She has won numerous awards for her scholarship and has held several fellowships, including the Oxford-Princeton Global Leaders Fellowship. She holds a PhD in public and international affairs from the University of Pittsburgh and a BA in geography from the University of Ghana.
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