British-Ghanaian writer Krystle Zara Appiah is back with her second novel, Half Lives, published by HarperCollins on June 4, 2026. The novel opens in 1970s Ghana, where sisters Evelyn and Maggie are two sides of the same coin, reliable Evelyn entrusted to support her struggling family, while Maggie skips class to flirt with boys. Despite their differences, they make a promise to one day escape to America and start a new life together.

Evelyn’s prospects transform when she marries Gus, a wealthy surgeon already living in New York, and quickly falls pregnant. Maggie, meanwhile, sees her own prospects vanish when she realises she too is expecting, without the crucial detail of a husband. When a terrible accident causes Evelyn to lose her unborn child, the answer seems simple: Evelyn takes her sister’s unwanted baby to the States to raise as her own. But the act carries untold consequences for both sisters, and when one of them changes her mind, an impossible decision awaits. Half Lives runs 400 pages and has already drawn praise as an emotional gut-punch of a novel about the enduring power of love, and what it can withstand before it breaks.

Appiah is a British-Ghanaian writer, editor, and screenwriter, born and raised in London, with a degree in literature and creative writing from the University of Kent. In 2020, she was selected for the London Library’s Emerging Writers Programme. Her debut novel, Rootless, a portrait of a British-Ghanaian marriage in crisis, exploring motherhood, family, and the meaning of home, won the NAACP Image Award and was named one of Cosmopolitan’s best books to look forward to in 2023. It drew praise from Louise O’Neill, who called it “tender and powerful, almost unbearably moving,” and from author Lizzie Damilola Blackburn, who called it “a beautiful, emotional rollercoaster.”

With Half Lives, Appiah moves her gaze back a generation and across the Atlantic, trading one marriage’s quiet unraveling for the far more combustible terrain of two sisters bound by a secret neither can fully outrun. Early readers have already flagged its cinematic instincts, one reviewer noted she was imagining the film adaptation before she’d even finished the book. Half Lives is available now wherever books are sold.