The Year the Rains Failed

A literary romance set in northern Kenya, 2023-2025, against the worst drought in forty years. Iris Halloway, a 32-year-old British climate journalist grieving her brother and carrying her grandfather's 1953 colonial diary, arrives in Marsabit to report on the crisis. She meets Dr. Kipchoge "Kip" Lemayian, a 35-year-old Samburu veterinarian, Oxford- and Edinburgh-trained, who has returned to run a mobile livestock clinic and to resist a foreign mining concession on his ancestral land.
Their love unfolds through drought, then catastrophic flood; through her discovery that her grandfather displaced his grandfather's clan in 1953; through a journalism that begins to feel like theft; through a final, devastating choice about who gets to belong and who gets to leave. It is Atonement meets The English Patient, set on the bone-dry plains where the climate emergency is no longer coming it has arrived.