The Archivist

A novel of memory, truth and the secrets we keep when the past refuses to stay buried.

Highfield, Salisbury, 1968. By candlelight, nine-year-old Tendai Chirandu watches her father type lists of names and hide them beneath the floorboards. A true story, he tells her, is one they will try to erase.

From a childhood under Rhodesian surveillance, through exile in Lusaka and a cold scholarship winter in 1970s Liverpool, Tendai comes home at independence to build the new Zimbabwe. But in the Ministry of Information her work is to make the disappeared sound merely absent — and what she cannot say aloud she confides to hidden notebooks: names, dates, witnesses, graves.

Half a century on, in a flat off Granby Street, Toxteth, her memory has begun to fail. The last man who knew her secret is dead. Before the words go, Tendai must decide who the truth belongs to — and what it will cost to give it back.

This novel is in development. If you wish to be a development reader contact me.

Coming 2027 in ebook and paperback. Read the first chapter.