Neroli

Every secret in the Kasbah was recorded. Someone has to play the tapes.

Nadia Tazi has spent thirty years in courtrooms speaking only for others. When her aunt Zineb dies, she returns to Tangier with a plan: sell the family house in ten days. The blue door, the courtyard and the orange tree about to bloom all filled with secrets.

She finds something else instead.

For decades, Zineb kept a secret Listening Room in the house, and the neighbors, exiles and lovers of the Kasbah left her their confessions on cassette. Hundreds of tapes wait in the attic: apologies never spoken, loves never admitted, wrongs never named.

A benefactor with beads of amber wants the house. A radio operator keeps a log he never dared to act on. A mother sets out two cups every morning and puts one away at noon. And a stormy night in April 1998 is still waiting for someone to say what happened on the water.

To keep the house, Nadia will have to find her own voice, and learn what it costs a whole community to hear itself.

Neroli is a novel of Mediterranean light and of everything left unsaid, with the slow patience of an orange blossom tree and a love that arrives the same way. For readers who like their mysteries human, their settings vivid, and their endings earned.

This is book One of the Listening Room novels.