Your turn. Two words. A directorship in the Azores. A mother in Lagos who sometimes asks for a father thirty-six years dead.
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Josephine Achebe has spent twenty years running from Lagos toward increasingly remote stretches of ocean. Reefs in the Maldives. Reefs in the Caribbean. Reefs in the Great Barrier. Now she is the obvious choice to direct the most advanced coral research facility in the Atlantic, and the offer letter from the Azores has been sitting on her desk for nine days.
Then her sister Adanna, who has been single-handedly managing their mother's decline for three years, sends two words: Your turn.
Jo flies to Lagos. She brings spreadsheets, a referral to a geriatric specialist, and a nineteen-column care plan color-coded like reef monitoring data. Adanna does not need any of it. What Grace needs, Adanna tells her, is someone to sit with her. Across weeks of akara smoke and 5 a.m. calls to prayer, a brother-in-law who remembers her as a stranger, and a mother who sometimes asks for a father thirty-six years dead, Jo has to decide what her own life is for: the directorship she has built herself toward for two decades, or the sister she has been outsourcing her family to since she was a graduate student.
A tender, precise novel about Nigerian diaspora, dementia, sisterly ledgers, and the cost of being the one who left.
