Dundurn | Discover a new story

We are thrilled to congratulate our author Cheluchi Onyemelukwe-Onuobia who is the inaugural winner of the SprinNG Women Authors Prize for her book, The Son of the House!

Dundurn Press is releasing the North American version of Onyemelukwe-Onuobia's powerful debut novel in May 2021. The Son of the House tells the stories of two Nigerian women, divided by class and social inequality, whose lives intersect when they're kidnapped, held captive, and forced to await their fate together.

I first stumbled across rumours of a woman accompanying Wolseley’s expedition to Red River in an appendix to George Stanley’s 1989, Toil and Trouble. There, Stanley points to Chief engineer Simon Dawson’s observation that was made in his official report on the Expedition: “I may draw attention to the fact that…a gentleman who had his wife with him, passed over all the rapids, portages and whirlpools of the Winnipeg without its occurring to their occupants that they were doing anything extraordinary.”

One of the things I used to comfort myself with when COVID-19 first appeared on the scene, waaaay back at the beginning of 2020 (are we done yet?), was that at least this wasn’t Ancient Egyptian times! That may sound odd, but I was in the midst of editing the second book in my series, The Desert Prince, which picks up with healer Sesha and her friends, where The Lost Scroll of the Physician leaves off.