The Twelfth House - Hardcover

Etta is an ogbanje, an unborn soul trapped in a cycle of conception and death in the wombs of one family. A gifted siren in the twelfth house of the zodiac--the house of secrets, of dreams, and of death--her voice unleashes ethereal songs that consume listeners with fear. Her desperate desire to live compels her father, Bako, into the hands of his captors of the coast of 18th-century Benin and carries him on a harrowing journey across the Atlantic to enslavement on a sugarcane plantation in Dominica.

Bako's defiant spirit--and Etta's fervent wish to be born--soon lead him to escape into the mountains. There, he has a fateful encounter with the Kalinaga woman named Mary who will ensure Etta's birth into the mortal world. But the child Etta bears physical scars of her many spiritual deaths, bringing her father to suspect the truth of his daughter's origins. As the landowners and tradesmen who enslave Etta's people feel her wrath and inflame rebellion, Bako fears it is the rebellion within which is the gravest.