Sheila Atim

Londinium, AD 211. Zuleika is a modern girl living in an ancient world. She's a back-alley firecracker, a scruffy Nubian babe with tangled hair and bare feet - and she's just been married off a fat old Roman. Life as a teenage bride is no joke but Zeeks is a born survivor. She knows this city like the back of her hand: its slave girls and drag queens, its shining villas and rotting slums. She knows how to get by. Until one day she catches the eye of the most powerful man on earth, the Roman Emperor, and her trouble really starts... Silver-tongued and merry-eyed, this is a story in song and verse, a joyful mash-up of today and yesterday.

Abducted and married into Boko Haram, the narrator of this story suffers the horrors of a community of men governed by a brutal code of violence. Barely more than a girl herself, she must learn how to survive as a woman with a child of her own. Then she is offered an escape of sorts - but only into a place where her traumas are met with the blinkered judgement of a society in denial.