Lola Jaye

Lola Jaye is a novelist and registered psychotherapist from London, who has also lived in Nigeria and the United States. Her first novel, By the Time You Read This, appeared in 2008; a year later came Reaching for the Stars, a short motivational title written for the Quick Reads scheme, which traced her own path from foster care to publication. The Attic Child (2022) is her first venture into historical fiction, and it started at the National Portrait Gallery, where Jaye came upon a photograph of the explorer Henry Morton Stanley beside a boy called Ndugu M'hali. Given to Stanley by a merchant in what is now Tanzania during the search for David Livingstone, and renamed Kalulu, the boy was schooled in London and died in 1877 in rapids on the Lualaba. "The question then became what if Ndugu M'Hali had been allowed to live?" Jaye has written. Her novel gives that life to Celestine, a twelve-year-old brought from Africa and kept in the attic of a house by the sea, and to Lowra, shut in the same room almost a century on.