A love story set in contemporary Ghana. A secret buried in a hospital for twenty-two years. A truth that arrives one day too late.
On a single night in Cape Coast, 1998, two crimes are committed in the same maternity ward. A corrupt nurse sells a newborn boy to a queen desperate for a male heir. A doctor, terrified of his wife's grief, swaps his own son with a female infant from the ward next door. Three babies go home in three directions. One mother wakes before dawn to count fingers where there should have been twenty.
Twenty-two years later, Efua Ametey is a Fine Art student at the University of Ghana ? emotionally intense, artistically gifted, and entirely unprepared for the man who walks into her life and refuses to leave. Prince Elikem Kumi has grown up inside a palace and a secret, and is discovering, at university in Accra, what it feels like to finally be himself. Their love is immediate, total, and exactly right.
Then a DNA test is taken. The preliminary results suggest the unthinkable: kinship. The love is destroyed by what the evidence appears to say. What neither of them knows is that the full results ? clearing them completely ? are fourteen days away. And by the time the truth arrives, Efua will not be there to receive it.
The Forbidden Bloom is the first volume of The Same Moon, Different Wombs ? a deeply emotional, culturally rich Ghanaian literary saga about love, identity, and the devastating consequences of human greed masquerading as fate. Set across the beaches of Anomabo, the campuses of Accra, and the royal compounds of Kumasi, it is a novel that will stay with you long after the final page.
Perfect for readers of Half of a Yellow Sun, A Thousand Splendid Suns, and Homegoing.
Continues in Volume II: Ashes and Truth.
