Awakening The Realm.

A drainage engineer. A drowned city beneath Lagos. A tide that will not wait.

Ifeoma Nwosu spends her days unclogging the drains of the most crowded city in Africa. Then, in the rainy season of 2025, a culvert under Ojuelegba fills with sea salt, the water climbs against gravity, and it speaks to her in the voice of the mother she lost to the sea in 2012.

Now Ifeoma is being hunted. A grumpy one-handed radio repairman, Pa Sunday Ajibola, pulls her into the Osa, a secret city built into colonial tunnels and drowned creeks. Its streets are lit by glowing lagoon water. Vendors sell SIM cards loaded with ancestors, and river spirits drive the barges. Four elemental Stools rule it: Salt, Ash, Red Earth and Harmattan. The Salt line was meant to have died with Ifeoma's mother, and the covenant that holds back the Atlantic depends on it.

Ifeoma has until the spring tide of 30 July to learn powers she never asked for. Her training comes in the form of maddening chores. She has to dodge her boss's written warnings and survive going viral as the 'Flood Witch of Third Mainland'. She also has to decide whom to trust, starting with Femi Onabanjo, a sharp-tongued wind courier with debts of his own. Chief Remilekun Bakare of Red Earth offers another future: a gleaming sea wall that would make the Salt line unnecessary. But Bakare knows what the Salt Table has hidden from Ifeoma's family for generations, and she is willing to use it.

Inside you'll find:

• A vivid, modern Lagos of BRT buses, keke rides, NEPA blackouts and Computer Village hustle, with a magical underworld beneath it
• An original elemental magic system rooted in water, earth, fire and wind
• A practical, stubborn engineer heroine who reads a city's pressure through concrete
• A slow-burn bond with a morally tangled courier who keeps asking why she never laughs
• A mentor with a burned past and a secret he swore to keep
• A story of grief, family and the cost of the bargains cities make to survive

For readers of urban fantasy who want a living city, high stakes and a heroine fighting for the people she loves, Salt Line is a rising-tide adventure set where the lagoon meets the Atlantic.

Ozioma Anastasia Ezebunwa writes fantasy fiction about cities, families and the hidden forces that shape them. Her work brings myth and magic into contemporary settings, where ordinary people find themselves carrying extraordinary responsibilities. In Salt Line she turns to the streets, drains and waterways of Lagos to tell a story of grief, courage and the bargains a city makes to survive. She writes for readers who love vivid worlds, determined heroines and stories that keep a close eye on the cost of power. Salt Line is her latest novel.