The House Across the Water

September 2026. At the border between Niger and Libya, a soldier has found Adedayo Akinola's list of mothers' names, and a smiling businessman in a leather jacket is calling every one of them.

In Akure, Dayo's seventeen-year-old sister Kemi buys a notebook and learns the one rule that matters: it stops when you stop paying. In the desert north of al-Qatrun, Dayo is thrown out of a saloon car to walk round police posts in soft sand, carried by a stranger from Yobe, and made to leave behind everything he owns. On a garage wall in Sabha he finds a name scratched with a nail: ADEWALE O. AKURE. 2023. TELL MY MOTHER.

The road north is farms and locked rooms. A hut of twenty-two men who stand up together in a tomato field. Thirteen bodies folded in rows of four in the back of an SUV. Four bottles of Pepsi for sixteen people in a valley, shared out by the cap. Men in white robes who come straight from prayer to slap their prisoners. And at the edge of the Mediterranean, a rubber boat built for thirty, with seventy-four people in it and one satellite phone.

Meanwhile the market women of Oja Oba close their stalls, sell their trays and their goats, and face down a ransom caller. Ella, the girl with the blue-flowered scarf, throws her oath into the night over Tripoli. And Osagie, who cannot swim and is not afraid, makes Dayo promise to call his mother once he is on the sea.

Built on published investigations and survivor testimony, The House Across the Water is the final book of The Sand Road.