Yeseni and the Daughter of Peace: Unbound Firsts 2023 Title

A powerful debut that combines historical fiction with fantasy and explores themes of enslavement and empire.

The year is 1748. Elewa, known as ‘the Daughter of Peace’, bears a heavy responsibility on her young shoulders: to maintain the fragile truce between the warring peoples of her West African kingdom.

But as she begins to understand her role in the peace negotiations, even greater pressures emerge. Elewa discovers that she has Yeseni, a powerful gift that allows her to see events from any point in time, and to travel into the past and future.

When she experiences horrific visions of life aboard a slave ship, she realises she has to face the ultimate crossroads. She could use her gift to intervene in the past and try to prevent the transatlantic slave trade ever taking place. But that means she, as the Daughter of Peace, would be leaving her village behind at a precarious moment in the reconciliation process.

Whichever path she chooses to take, the future of her people lies on her shoulders.

Solange Burrell moved to St. Catharines, Ontario in Canada in 2019 where she worked as a journalist and is currently a building surveyor. She studied journalism at university in London. Yeseni and the Daughter of Peace is her first novel.