THE ABSENT PARENTS

Description

The Adeyemi house has forty-foot glass walls, German cars and a security system that tracks every room. It also has three children nobody is watching.

Dele Adeyemi is a CEO who checks on his family on an app instead of looking at them. Beatrice, the ‘Mother of the Parish’, leads the church’s purity rallies while her own daughter goes unseen. In their mansion, provision has quietly replaced presence, and the silence at the breakfast table is getting louder.

Tobi, 15, is the son nobody asks about. He finds a father figure in the ShadowKing, a voice in the dark that always asks, ‘Have you eaten?’

Aisha, 14, is the perfect daughter, with ironed uniforms and straight A’s. A stranger online has noticed how lonely she is, and he is good at being the one who ‘understands’.

Kemi, 8, is raised by a purple tablet that knows her favourite colour better than her parents do. Then a ‘secret game’ starts playing in her kitchen.

On the night of the family’s grandest gala, everything they have hidden goes up on the screens in front of three hundred guests. By midnight, their house is dark, their phones are dead, and someone is at the study window.

The Absent Parents is a gripping family thriller set in Lagos, and a warning for every parent who has ever said: ‘not now’. It asks one question that stays with you: what is your child really doing while you are in the room?

If you loved the tension of Little Fires Everywhere and the moral weight of We Need to Talk About Kevin, this is your next read.

Content note: Mature themes, including online grooming of a minor (not depicted explicitly), teenage drug dependency, and home invasion. Intended for adult readers (18+).

Put down the screen. Pick up the soul. Before the power goes out.