The Water House

An unexplained tragedy. A handsome stranger. A house of ghosts and memories.

1967, Nigeria. Celia has been estranged from her family since they banished her to St Agnes’s reform school after her brother’s death. When the school closes down, she has nowhere to go and no one to write for help.

Hoping to leave the demons of her past behind, Celia secures a job as a typist, marking the beginning of a new chapter. When a charismatic and secretive aspiring politician hires her and proposes, she begins to dream of a possible new future. But everything falls apart and Celia, in desperation, returns to her childhood home, the Water House.

There, Celia is confronted by her hostile mother, a past love, and the horrors that the house holds deep in its walls. And as civil war brews in the outside world, Celia begins to suspect that the truth behind her brother’s death might be far more sinister than she imagined.

Told in eerily beautiful prose, in a fresh twist on the Gothic novel, Ike-Njoku weaves a mesmerising story of a woman confronting a home where the past refuses to stay buried.