Possession

“Now I’m dead I’ve got my ambition back. I want to be a psychic surgeon—to sew the stories back into the land. Because a country is a body with memories too…”

Four mother’s lives interweave across continents and time…

Kasambayi, recently arrived in the UK from the Democratic Republic of Congo, starts her contractions on the number 38 bus at Clapton Ponds, and gives the final push at Victoria. She names her daughter Hope—hope for their new life, hope for their future.

Once Hope is fully grown, her path crosses with Alice, a foreign correspondent with a particular interest in cobalt—the latest blood mineral being mined in the DRC. But will their budding friendship threaten the life that Kasambayi has so carefully built for them in London?

Meanwhile Alice Seeley-Harris, a Victorian Missionary’s wife in King Leopold’s Congo, has a horrible sense that history is repeating itself.