Songs of Dust and Water

von M. J. Hydara

252 Seiten, Taschenbuch

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

Two villages, six hundred kilometres apart, and one question: who will own what they build?In Madina, in the dry north of Awdagha, a weaver's son is taken on at a plant of glass and steel that promises the village light, water and a future. The engineer who runs it trusts a certified part over the local smith's mended one, and a minister in the capital has her own plans for it. When the plant burns, the village is left with the ruin, and the engineer is gone.Ten years later and six hundred kilometres south, in Tekuru, on a floodplain the river has abandoned, the well at Nafawol is failing. Dr Arramata, a daughter of the village, comes home with money from a fund that will pay only for what the village itself owns and runs. With her comes the same foreign engineer, carrying a debt he does not name. Kadiatou, keeper of the well, does not trust him. Fatou, who has read four hundred contracts, trusts only what is written down. Isatou, who keeps the women's savings, wants to know into whose hand the money goes.Year by year they bring in water, build a road and a mill, write rules that hold, and learn what the rules cost. Their neighbours join them in a Union. Then a company offers the Union money on a scale nobody in the region has seen, in return for the first right to buy everything it grows, and the villages must decide with white stones and black.Songs of Dust and Water is a novel about ownership and its price: who holds the key, who pays, and what a village owes the ones who come after. It is set across the Sahel and the floodplain country below it, and much of it belongs to the women who keep a village's well, its accounts and its savings.A free reader's companion for book clubs and reading groups is at songsofdustandwater.com.

• Reihe: Independently published
• ISBN: 9798162251088
• Sprache: Englisch
• Erscheinungsdatum: 16.10.2026
• Größe: 216 x 140 mm
• Verlag: Independently published