People magazine has exclusively revealed the cover of Wayétu Moore’s sophomore novel, Habila, due out from Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House, on January 12, 2027. The book is available for preorder now.
Inspired by the African legend of Mami Wata, Habila follows Melanctha, the daughter of a Liberian family who relocate to Texas after the death of their patriarch. When a school bully pushes Melanctha into a lake, she discovers she can breathe underwater, a gift bestowed by Habila, a half-woman, half-sea deity whose centuries-old hatred for men has become the organising force of her existence. Habila gives Melanctha a comb with a lethal power: anyone who touches it can be lured into the water and made to disappear. As Melanctha’s connection to Habila deepens, a family mystery begins to surface, and the deity’s own secrets with it.
The novel’s animating question began, Moore told People, with her own experience of what femininity demands of women. “I was indoctrinated to view niceness as the closest virtue to femininity,” she explained. “Any feeling that didn’t fit the mold of being agreeable or soft was buried, considered masculine. So I, like many women, suppressed rage, hubris, vengefulness.” In her debut, She Would Be King, she wrote a heroine who ultimately saves an entire country at her own expense. For this book, she wanted to go somewhere different. “I asked myself: What happens when a heroine does not want to be good? What wars would she wage, and against whom, when she taps into the wholeness of her being?”
Those questions led her deeper into the mythology of Mami Wata, a figure, Moore points out, that belongs to no single culture. “From the Inkanyamba of South Africa to the Havfrue of Scandinavia, the Sirena of Philippines to Marie Laveau of 19th-century New Orleans; we all have a language and folklore for the woman who knew that niceness was only half of the story,” she told People. “I needed to write about her.”
Moore is the author of the novel She Would Be King and the memoir The Dragons, the Giant, the Women. Habila is her most anticipated work yet, and if the premise is anything to go by, worth every month of the wait.
Habila publishes January 17, 2027 and is available for preorder wherever books are sold.
Synopsis below:
In this ambitious new novel, the bestselling and prize-winning writer Wayétu Moore delivers us into the lives of a young girl, Melanctha, and her family amid the loss of their patriarch, Tokpa. In search of a fresh start, they relocate from Liberia to the backwater town of Hunt, Texas, a land that proves hostile to them—until one day, when a school bully pushes Melanctha into a lake, and she finds that she can breathe underwater. Melanctha discovers that her newfound power comes from Habila, a gorgeous, beguiling half-woman half-sea deity who bestows her with a gift: a comb that, if touched, can lure people into the water and make them disappear for good.
But Melanctha’s connection to Habila has not come without a price. Habila has languished alone for millennia, blaming men for her loneliness. She harbors a hatred so potent that she has committed her existence to ridding the world of them. As Melanctha’s ties to Habila deepen, a family mystery unravels, and she learns that the siren may have secrets, too.
Inspired by the African legend of Mami Wata, Habila is a kaleidoscopic tale tracing a family and a woman through the years as they navigate the supernatural forces and long-buried truths that shape their lives. In her signature lush, lyrical prose, Moore crafts an elegant story that probes the corners of womanhood and motherhood, immigrant identity, and the legacies wrought by men who take but never give back.
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