Some housekeeping first, because you deserve a straight answer about the empty shelves.

If you went looking for Verified or Five Hours in the last few weeks, they were gone. That was my doing. I published both books faster than I should have, and then I kept working on them after they were already in your hands. Revisions stacked on revisions. Different readers ended up holding different versions of the same story. That is chaos, and it is not the experience anyone signs up for when they spend money and an evening on a novel.

So I pulled them back. Not forever. Both books are going through the kind of vetting and editing they should have had the first time: full passes, outside eyes, and a finished text that stays finished. When they return, they will return once.

Which brings me to the good news.

A Witness to the Bloom is out now, and it went through exactly that process before it ever reached a shelf. It is the first book in a series called The Long Season, and I am excited, in the way you are excited when you finally let go of something, to see it out in the wild.

The novel started with a question that would not leave me alone. Not the sudden apocalypse, the asteroid, the outbreak. Something slower. What does a gradually changing earth do to the people living on it? Not to humanity in the abstract, but to a household. To a mother who grew up under one sky and a daughter growing up under another. Generations experience a slow change differently, and they owe each other different things because of it.

I set the story in Lagos, through the eyes of a doctor named Oche Adeyemi, because the view matters. Where you stand changes what a crisis looks like, who gets protected, and who gets asked to adapt. It is a different vantage point and a different geography than my earlier work, and it was chosen on purpose. I wanted the fresh angle, and the story demanded it.

If you read it, you know where to find me. I read everything.

More when the pruning is done.

E.K.