Here’s the book for the weekend – and it’s a long bank holiday so you’ll have plenty of time to indulge yourself and be swept away by the wonderful The Attic Child by Lola Jaye.
This was such a powerful, if at times uncomfortable, read. A dual timeline novel telling the stories of two children trapped in an attic almost one hundred years apart.
From the opening lines, I was desperate to discover what happened to Dikembe, a young African boy who is taken from his family in the Congo at the tender age of ten and travels to England as a companion to explorer, Richard Babbington. Lola Jaye takes you by the hand and leads you on a journey that interweaves the lives of Dikembe and Lowra as they navigate their path through the terrible circumstances in which they find themselves. It was at times a dark and disturbing read but a story of the redemptive power of friendship.
Lola Jaye’s inspiration for this novel was triggered by a photograph she saw at the National Portrait Gallery – part of an exhibition on Black British Victorians.
One of the photographs was of a young African boy, Ngudu M’hali, pictured alongside the explorer Henry Stanley. The boy had a short and tragic life, taken from his family and either sold or given to Stanley as either a slave, servant or companion. Accounts differ and the truth may never come to light. Ngudu M’hali drowned in a canoeing accident on the River Congo in 1877 when he was twelve years old but The Attic Child explores what might have happened to a boy in similar circumstances had he lived. This is not Ngudu’s story – but inspired by the photograph Lola Jaye began to craft a wonderful tale of one such boy, Dikembe. Oh, my heart broke for that small child, torn from his loving family and thrust into an unfamiliar life in an unfamiliar land.
A timely book and one that has stayed with me long after I reached the final page.
Two children trapped in the same attic, almost a century apart, bound by a secret.
1907: Twelve-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 . . .
Decades 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 is an old porcelain doll, an unusual beaded claw necklace and, most curiously, a sentence etched on the wall behind an old cupboard, written in an unidentifiable language. Artefacts 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 . . .
The Attic Child is published by Pan and is available from all good bookstores and online retailers.
