Harare Review of Books

432 pp. Published May 20, 2025 by DAW Books. SF.

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There will be mild spoilers!

This thrilling novel grabs you and just won’t let you go until it’s done! Even though I had kind of figured out what was going on fairly quickly, the central conceit and twists and turns kept me hooked.

Ethan Krol, a detective, is called to the scene of a crime: A father and son have drowned in an apartment in Chicago. Plot twist: it’s not freshwater in and around them in the room, but ocean water. When other police departments—in Rhode Island, and Nigeria—contact Krol to tell him they have similar baffling cases, he becomes even more intrigued. And then he’s on the trail of a suspect, but it takes him far too long to realise he’s not dealing with something or someone ordinary.

A fair few recent SF works have dealt with supernatural vengeance for the trans-Atlantic slave trade (Lost Ark Dreaming by Suyi Davies Okungbowa and The Deep by Rivers Solomon come to mind). Generally in these stories, revenants come up from the deep to wreak their revenge on the living. Sometimes the plot is not centred on vengeance, though, but a reimagining of how those thrown overboard could have survived (or come back to life) and built new communities. Esperance, without giving too much away, is a bit of both.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that this is one of my favourite reads of the year. It combines many excellent things: it’s a police procedural with SF elements; Oyebanji’s tongue-in-cheek humour about oyinbos lands exactly right; and it works on the level of telling stories for healing, imagining a new narrative for descendants of enslaved people—not to mention vengeance, which is very satisfying. Oyebanji is also pitch-perfect in his writing style (with, obviously and presumably, excellent editing): There are no parts of the novel that feel extraneous or poorly written. There are no hanging threads or loose ends. Everything fits. And, finally and importantly, all of the characters in Esperance are well-developed and interesting.

This is a very smart novel, and I cannot recommend it enough. This is the reader’s dream: to come to a novel with high expectations and have them exceeded.

Thanks to DAW and NetGalley for early access.

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