City Libraries, City of Gold Coast

The attic child, Lola Jaye

eng

no index present

fiction

The attic child

Lola Jaye

Two children trapped in the same attic, almost a century apart. 1905: Eleven year old Celestine spends most of his time locked in an attic room of a large house by the sea. Taken from his homeland and treated as an unpaid servant, he dreams of his family in Africa even if, as the years pass, he struggles to remember his mother's face and sometimes his real name... Almost a century later, Lowra, a young orphan girl, born into wealth and privilege, will find herself banished to the same attic. Lying under the floorboards of the room are a yellow haired rag doll, a tribal head necklace and, most curiously, a sentence etched on the wall behind an old cupboard, written in an unidentifiable language. Artifacts that will offer her a strange kind of comfort and lead her to believe that she was not the first child to be imprisoned there... A hauntingly powerful, emotionally charged dual narrative novel about family secrets, love and loss, identity and belonging, seen through the lens of Black British History