Proudly Nigerian

Every rise masks a deadly fall. Especially his.

Being seventeen and about to graduate high school is likely one of the best years for most teens. Not Naeto. With desiring a life contrary to his father’s plans and simmering sexual tension threatening to ruin his friendship with his best friend Zino, his life’s a twisting mass of complications.

Getting a full-board scholarship into Charleston, a top-tier dance academy in Arizona, should have smoothed things out, but complications have a way of finding Naeto.

First he meets Eloise, Charleston’s star pupil trapped with the ghost from her past, and his awakened heart yearns for nothing more than to capture hers. Then he learns the girl he loves would do anything to hold on to her past including giving up her present with him and a face from his past comes calling with plans of his own.

Peter Idenala’s stable but uninteresting life, as an ambitious young banker, is disrupted when he comes across a book, published as fiction, recounting the torrid experiences he lived through during his days in the university. He is shaken because the writer is Neta Okoye, a girl who broke his heart and dumped him six years before. Peter is forced to revisit his past, to relive his once complicated relationship with Neta and the mistakes that marred their years in school; the friendships they found and lost.

When the book leads him directly to her, they are faced with a difficult decision: Continue with their emotionally-empty lives, independent of each other, or be together again and confront the trail of past misfortunes that binds them. For Neta, accepting Peter again comes with a promise of happiness, but it also carries the risk of uncovering the secrets she has carried throughout her life. Secrets involving a brother she used to sleep with.

Their relationship faces a battle against this past blighted by pain and loss, by youth and stupidity, by unprotected sex and incest, by betrayal and heartbreaks, by manslaughter and suicide.