MAY DAY

They came for the children on a Tuesday.

Biafra, 1968.

A republic is collapsing under siege. Sixty thousand federal troops close in. A brutal blockade turns away even powdered milk for starving infants. And deep behind enemy lines, in a place known only as the House of Children, 312 Igbo children are being processed for export-cataloged, stripped of identity, and funneled toward a fate far darker than adoption.

Fifteen men cross into hostile territory to stop it.

A reluctant tutor, driven by the desperate need to find milk for his newborn twins.
A musician who refuses to lay down his guitar-because to abandon it is to lose the very rhythm of his soul.
A seventeen-year-old soldier who counts everything: the dead, the days, the inches between survival and annihilation.

They are all that stands between life and disappearance.

They are joined by others who know the cost of this war too well:
A midwife who has risked the journey seven times, carrying life in and hope out.
A hunter who reads the forest like a living map beneath his feet.
A downed enemy pilot who spent forty-seven days listening-counting children through a wall.

The mission is impossible.

Eleven minutes to breach the compound.
Twenty minutes to move 312 children onto a stolen C-130.

One guitar must guide them across a darkened runway.
One gold pocket watch must buy the only thing left to spend-time.

MAY DAY is a powerful literary war novel in the tradition of Half of a Yellow Sun and The Pianist-a story of courage under impossible odds, of identity and sacrifice, and of the fragile mathematics that separates rescue from ruin.

This is not just a story about war.
It is a story about what remains when everything else is taken.

The string did not break.
The song does not end.

"The mathematics of annihilation had no variable for courage."

"You name your children for what you refuse to surrender."

"A man who abandons his instrument abandons the frequency at which his soul vibrates."