She was sent to negotiate a treaty. She did not expect to negotiate her heart.
Adunni Ọládapọ̀ has spent her life being useful — as the iron-bound Captain of Ẹkùn Quarter, as the only living practitioner of the ààrọ-ọkàn ceremony, as the woman her city sends when the situation requires someone who will not flinch. When the Ivory Throne of the Aro Confederacy summons Adó-Èkìtì to renew a forty-year peace treaty or lose its protected status, she is the obvious choice. She walks in knowing it is a trap. She walks in anyway.
Folarin Aro has been building something since he was seven years old and his father disappeared inside the very court he now controls. He has spent twenty-four years converting grief into strategy, absence into ambition, a dead man’s legacy into a plan he has not yet named. When he summons the iron-bound woman from the Seven Groves, he believes he is making a political calculation. He is not wrong. He is also not entirely right.
What they find in the walls of the Ivory Throne will rewrite forty years of history. What they find in each other is harder to file away.
Between Two Crowns is a Yoruba-inspired political romance set in a richly imagined secondary world — a novel about the negotiation of power, the inheritance of grief, the patience of iron, and two people who are each other’s most dangerous and most necessary discovery.
For readers of: Roshani Chokshi · Shelley Parker-Chan · Yaa Gyasi · N.K. Jemisin
