THE YEARS THE LOCUST ATE

She left home for three years. The sky closed for twenty. Tiwa is nineteen when her father sends her from the West African town of Ilé-Olú to New York to study nursing. Three weeks after she lands, civil war swallows her homeland overnight. The airport closes. The phone lines die. Every letter she mails is answered by silence, and she does not know if her family is living or dead. All she carried out of Africa was her mother's worn gold cross and one sentence prayed over her heart: He is never closed. He never says the lines are down. On that sentence, Tiwa builds a life. Twenty years of night shifts and hospital beds, praying for names no one can confirm are still alive. A love she never looked for, with a Georgia man whose mother will not say her name at her own table. Two sons. And a faith that refuses to call any door final. Then the sky over her homeland opens at last — and in a storefront church in the Bronx, an old man asks Tiwa to say her full name, and a room full of her own people slowly rises to its feet. Her father was not merely an important man, and the home she has mourned is not what her grief let her remember. Now she must return to a wounded kingdom, face the cousin who occupies her father's stolen throne, and descend into the tombs of her fathers, where a treasure sealed to her bloodline waits behind a door that could crown her or bury her. Spanning seventy years and two continents, The Years the Locusts Ate is a sweeping story of exile and homecoming, prejudice and reconciliation, hidden royalty and the only crown that does not rot. Each chapter closes with Scripture and a prayer point, making it ideal for devotional reading and book clubs alike — a story for every reader who believes, or needs to believe again, the promise of Joel 2:25: "I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten."