The Edge of Water
Published on 4. February 2025
Book
Paperback/Softback
272 pages
978-1-963108-05-7 (ISBN)
Description
Winner of the Westport Prize for Literature
>Finalist for New American Voices Award, Pacific Northwest Book Award, and Oregon Book Award
>Best Book of the Month at Oprah Daily, Apple Books, Alta Journal, Ms. Magazine, Book Riot, The Roots, Write or Die, and Southern Review of Books
Set between Nigeria and New Orleans, The Edge of Water tells the story of a young woman who dreams of life in America, as the collision of traditional prophecy and individual longing tests the bonds of a family during a devastating storm. In Ibadan, Nigeria, a mother receives a divination that foretells danger for her daughter in America. In spite of this warning, she allows her to forge her own path, and Amina arrives in New Orleans filled with hope. But just as Amina begins to find her way, a hurricane threatens to destroy the city, upending everything she'd dreamed of and the lives of all she holds dear. Years later, her daughter is left with questions about the mother she barely knew, and the family she has yet to discover in Nigeria. Exploring the love of a determined mother and dreaming daughter who do not say enough to each other until it is too late, the detangling of Yoruba Christianity, traditional religion, and folklore, and the tellings of three generations of daring women--through times of longing, promise, and romance, as well as heartbreak--Olufunke Grace Bankole's The Edge of Water is a luminous debut novel about a young woman brave enough to leave all she knows behind, and the way her fate transforms a family destined to stay together.
>Finalist for New American Voices Award, Pacific Northwest Book Award, and Oregon Book Award
Longlisted for the Carol Shields Prize and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award
Best Book of the Year at TIME, Apple, Debutiful, Electric Literature, Well-Read Black Girl, Chicago Review of Books, and Goodreads Afrocritik Notable African Book of 2025>Best Book of the Month at Oprah Daily, Apple Books, Alta Journal, Ms. Magazine, Book Riot, The Roots, Write or Die, and Southern Review of Books
Set between Nigeria and New Orleans, The Edge of Water tells the story of a young woman who dreams of life in America, as the collision of traditional prophecy and individual longing tests the bonds of a family during a devastating storm. In Ibadan, Nigeria, a mother receives a divination that foretells danger for her daughter in America. In spite of this warning, she allows her to forge her own path, and Amina arrives in New Orleans filled with hope. But just as Amina begins to find her way, a hurricane threatens to destroy the city, upending everything she'd dreamed of and the lives of all she holds dear. Years later, her daughter is left with questions about the mother she barely knew, and the family she has yet to discover in Nigeria. Exploring the love of a determined mother and dreaming daughter who do not say enough to each other until it is too late, the detangling of Yoruba Christianity, traditional religion, and folklore, and the tellings of three generations of daring women--through times of longing, promise, and romance, as well as heartbreak--Olufunke Grace Bankole's The Edge of Water is a luminous debut novel about a young woman brave enough to leave all she knows behind, and the way her fate transforms a family destined to stay together.
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Olufunke Grace Bankole is a Nigerian American writer. A graduate of Harvard Law School, and a recipient of a Soros Justice Advocacy Fellowship, her work has appeared in various literary journals, including Ploughshares, Glimmer Train Stories, AGNI, Michigan Quarterly Review, New Letters, The Antioch Review, and Stand Magazine. She won the first-place prize in the Glimmer Train Short-Story Award for New Writers, and was the Bread Loaf-Rona Jaffe Scholar in Fiction at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. She has been awarded an Oregon Literary Fellowship in Fiction, a Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation grant, a residency-fellowship from the Anderson Center at Tower View, and has received a Pushcart Special Mention for her writing. She lives in Portland, Oregon.