We are extraordinarily proud to announce the publication of All of Us by Bolouebi Solomon, a debut nonfiction memoir coming from Beam Press, our nonfiction trade imprint at Authors & Co.
This is the kind of book that reminds us what publishing is for.
About the book
All of Us is a memoir rooted in a communal compound on Abba Street in the Diobu suburb of Port Harcourt in Southern Nigeria. Bolouebi Solomon — known to those who love her as Ebi — grew up in a world of twenty-three shared rooms, soot-caked kitchen walls, a tap that occasionally produced water, and a bakery next door that came alive in the dead of night with the smell of flour drifting over the fence.
What makes this book extraordinary is not the hardship it contains, though that is present and honestly rendered. It is the chain of women woven through every page. Aunties, cousins, neighbours, a grandmother figure called Sisi who ran a kiosk from the compound and fed anyone who was hungry, counselled anyone who needed it, and prayed for everyone whether they wanted it or not. These are the women who carried Ebi, one way or another, from her earliest years through to adulthood.
All of Us is their story as much as hers.
The manuscript opens with a letter to her own soul:
You will not have a peaceful routine with a mother and father who would steadfastly see to your needs. You will have experiences that will ignite fear in you. You will survive each wave of disappointment. Each wave of scarcity. You will survive it all.
What follows is proof that she did.
Bolouebi surrounded by the people who love her, celebrating All of Us at an early reader event before it goes to the world. We are working on something exciting with the original cover design and cannot wait to show you how it evolves..Ebi is a first-time author writing from a community that rarely finds its way onto the shelves of Western bookshops — and when it does, it is often softened. Footnoted. Adjusted to make an unfamiliar world more comfortable for the reader coming to it from the outside.
All of Us does none of that. It is written in Ebi’s own language, with her own food and her own people and her own truth on every page. The pidgin English is there. The Ijaw phrases are there. The specific texture of the world she came from is there, unfiltered, because that is the only way this story could ever be told with integrity.
Reading diversely means reading things that ask something of you. It means sitting with a world you have never been inside and trusting the writer to show you what is real. Ebi’s job is to express herself authentically. The reader’s job is to meet her there.
When Ebi was asked about the reader she was writing for, she said something we want to share exactly as she said it.
If you have an African friend, a Nigerian friend, a diaspora friend, this manuscript gives you a tiny window into who that person was before you knew them. Because if we do not tell our stories, people would not know where we came from. They would only know snippets.
This is a book for the Nigerian diaspora community, and for the British African diaspora more broadly, who deserve to see their own experience reflected back at them with this kind of specificity and care. It is also a book for any reader willing to go somewhere unfamiliar and trust the writer completely.
The word at the heart of the book
Ebi chose the word scarcity deliberately. It runs through the manuscript like a current, and it carries two distinct dimensions.
The first is material. The school fees never quite paid. The shoes with stitched straps that kept breaking and being stitched again. The hunger a child learned to manage alone because there was no permanent woman in the house to notice it.
The second is emotional. The absence of enough support, enough safety, enough of the warmth that carries a child from one stage of growing up to the next. At each stage, she realised, it was not there.
She stayed away from the word trauma deliberately, because scarcity felt truer and more honest. Trauma is individualised. Scarcity is a cycle – universal, collective, passed from one person to the next by people who were themselves living inside it. That distinction is part of what makes this manuscript so rare.
The village behind this book
Before All of Us arrived with us, Ebi worked with Deborah Balogun, a British Nigerian editor whose specialism is editing stories that centre inclusivity and underrepresented voices. Deborah spent months drawing the depth out of these pages, asking the hard questions, pushing Ebi further into the emotional truth of what she had lived. The manuscript that arrived with us was one of the most beautifully prepared we have ever received.
There is a whole village behind this book already, long before it reaches readers. That feels entirely right for a memoir that is, at its heart, about what it means to be carried by a community.
A note from Abigail Horne, founder of Authors & Co
Towards the end of my first conversation with Ebi, she told me that she had known almost immediately she had found the person ready to run with this book. And then she said, very simply, that we both deserved it.
I can count on one hand the moments in nearly a decade of publishing that have made me feel that way. This is one of them. We are going to run with it with everything we have.
All of Us by Bolouebi Solomon. Coming soon from Beam Press at Authors & Co.
Authors & Co is a UK hybrid publisher for nonfiction books. Founded by Abigail Horne in 2017, we help founders, leaders, and experts write and publish books that work strategically. Over 700 authors, 50+ countries.
