In Nigerian-American Ebele Chizea’s stunning debut novel, teenager Ada and her mother flee the civil war of their West African home and come to America in 1966, where Ada soon discovers—and blossoms within—the US counterculture movement, developing a drive for anti-war activism which she takes with her back to Nabuka only to uncover new truths about herself as well as family secrets that threaten to shatter her plans for the future. 

While protesting the Vietnam war in America, Ada forges friendships with other nonconformist youth: free-spirited Stacey, a boisterous hippie, and Sal, a philosophical wanderlust. Soon she seeks independence from her mother, love on her own terms, as well as sexual autonomy. College provides Ada with opportunities for academic success, personal experimentation, and full independence, as well as heartbreak. Despite loss and grief over a decade, Ada’s heart becomes her own true compass and guides her to fully become the leader and activist she’d always been deep inside.

Chizea’s brilliant prose and storytelling skills are fully apparent as she reveals a young woman’s struggle to find balance in her life and in herself while straddling physical and social borders of two distinctly different cultures.

AQUARIAN DAWN: A Novel, by Ebele Chizea

ISBN: 978-1-953103-25-3; $15; October 25, 2022; 224 pages;
Three Rooms Press; Trade Paper Original


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An Excerpt from Aquarian Dawn

 It was the end and the beginning. We had left dry, dusty winds for frigid cold.

We moved to a small, quaint Pennsylvania town called Greensberg—surrounded by hills and trees and bestowed with majestic seasons that revealed themselves in lush colors. Spring, green. Summer, yellow. Fall, brown, red, and orange. Winter, white. Greensberg differed from the flat lands and the dry and rainy seasons of Southern Nabuka.

As I pressed my brooding face into the side of the passenger side door, all I could see was a stream of white faces, the only black faces being Ma’s and mine. Four years ago, we relocated from Ogu, our fishing village in Nabuka, to Lagoon, the country’s capital for Ma’s new work at a clinic.

Excerpt from Aquarian Dawn by Ebele Chizea (c) Copyright 2022


About Ebele Chizea

Ebele Chizea was born in Nigeria and moved to the United States at age sixteen. Since graduating with honors in 2004 from Thiel Colege in Greenville, PA, she has published fiction, poetry, and essays in various publications including The African, The Sentinel, The Nigerian Punch, Sahara Reporter, as well as her own online publication, Drumtide Magazine, which featured  interviews with prominent figures in the entertainment and literary fields including Afro-punk pioneer Lunden DeLeon, afrobeat musician Seun Kuti, and award-winning Nigerian Belgian novelist, Chika Unigwe. She is the author of How to Slay in Life: A Book of Proverbial WisdomAQUARIAN DAWN is her debut novel. She currently lives in Santa Monica, CA.

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