The Second Burial: A Testimony

My sister died on a Tuesday. Six weeks later, her grave was found open — the earth pushed outward, the burial cloth folded, not torn.

Nsansa was eight. Now she walks at night in a line of eleven, carrying a hoe over her shoulder, eyes fixed ahead — and only her older sister has seen her go.

What follows is a testimony, not a ghost story: a girl who copes with grief by counting everything, tracking a night economy she doesn't understand, while by day a travelling preacher's tent fills with frightened neighbours paying to name a culprit — and the old woman who still knows the old ways starts to look, to a frightened crowd, exactly like an answer.

The Second Burial moves between two kinds of dark: an invented night-world of the walking dead, and the real, documented machinery of witchcraft accusation that has cost real elderly women their lives, in villages not so different from this one.

For older readers — Harry Potter age and up, though this one asks harder questions of its reader. Adrian Scarlett's first book for those who, at the end of his children's stories, used to ask what was really out there past the last house.