DEAD LOAD

Professor Babatunde Adebayo built his house in Bodija in 1980 and has no intention of leaving it. His wife is dead, one son is buried, the other is in Berlin, and his daughter Morayo, an NHS doctor in Leeds, runs his life by phone and bank transfer. He winds the hall clock every Sunday, eight turns, never nine, and refuses to take any blood pressure tablet but his own brand.

Then he falls, and lies on the tiles for four hours with his phone in the next room.

Jumoke Alabi is twenty-four, a nurse with an NHS job waiting in Halifax and a visa appointment in Lagos on the second of October. She takes the professor’s money to clear her mother’s debts. She does not expect to like him. And she does not expect that, on the night the national grid fails, she will have to choose between the bus to Lagos and an old man who will not admit he is running out of time.

Dead Load is a novel about the weight we refuse to put down, the people who leave, the people who stay, and the gap between them that may be what keeps a family whole.