Set in contemporary Notting Hill, Man-man and his friends are swept up in the exuberant preparations for carnival. But his mother is ill and even as he dances, he calls desperately to the Queen of Revels, as old as time to make her well again.Swept away with his best friend Kareem and sharp-tongued sister Panama, to a place in between, the Queen of Revels plunges Man-man into Africa's past and reveals his family's heritage. As they gather around the sacred Tree of Memories, he witnesses many slaves, captives whose pain and anguish and longing is held by the tree. Man-man understands how this is draining his mother and how he must help her back to the freedom stolen from his ancestors

Eleven year old Ajuba has been abandoned at a Devon boarding school by her Ghanaian father. Haunted by the circumstances of her mother's breakdown, Ajuba falls under the spell of new girl Polly Venus, and her chaotic, glamorous family. As the passionate bond between the two girls deepens, they discover what they think are the bones of dead kittens, hidden in the attic of the Venus home; but the bones are human. The girls set out to unravel the mystery but as the summer draws to a close, three tragedies conflate, with catastrophic results.

The Secret of the Purple Lake is a collection of five interlinked stories that take us from Ghana to Orkney, and from Spain to Norway and Thailand. As a minor character from one story assumes a major role in the next, we meet a fascinating cast, including Imoro the magic elephant, the Walrus Prince, and the Wild Princesses of Rousay. The protagonist of the opening tale, The Fisherman's Daughter, has to retrieve her dead father's bones from the bottom of the sea, in order to bring harmony back to her seaside village. In fulfilling her task, she must evade the clutches of The Fish-man of the Purple Lake. The Fish-man, a monstrous creature with the body of a man and the head of a fish, was once a beautiful boy from the Sahel, and has his own story about how he became the Fish-man.