Prefers The Deep Blue Sea

A young African left his village with a number in his head and the deep blue sea in his heart. What follows will cost him more than he imagined and return him home with more than he expected.

Tim grows up watching the Land Cruisers of successful men disappear around the bend of a red dirt road, and decides that the road leads somewhere worth going. Armed with hidden money, hard-won street wisdom, and the advice of people who have attempted what he is about to attempt, he sets out on the irregular migration route that has claimed thousands of lives, north through the Sahara, through the brutal transit economy of a Libyan city, and finally onto an inflatable boat in the dark Mediterranean at midnight.

Prefers the Deep Blue Sea is the story of what that journey actually costs. Not in money, though the price in money is ruinous but in the pieces of yourself the road collects, in the people left in desert sand and under dark water, in the particular moral geography of a man who has done what he needed to do to survive and must now decide what kind of person he intends to be on the other side.

It is also the story of what the journey gives back. The community of the desperate and the disciplined. The love found in an unexpected place. The legal status earned one document at a time. And the homecoming; the wedding, the village, the log where the young men still gather in the evening, where Tim finally sits and tells the truth about everything, and offers the next generation something more valuable than his story: a way forward that does not require dying to get there.

Written with the moral urgency of Chinua Achebe and the narrative sweep of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Prefers the Deep Blue Sea is a novel about ambition, survival, love, and the price of belonging - told by a voice that knows the road from the inside.

For every young man on a log somewhere, watching the horizon and deciding.