Esi Ankomah and Kojo Liang were the pair everyone in Kumasi swore by—kenkey and shito, soldering iron and breadboard, palm wine and a beachfire. They met in a fluorescent lab at KNUST when the power cut mid-presentation and he lit her demo with his phone. A decade later, after building a life around sensors, sketchbooks, and night buses between Tema and Cape Coast, they slipped into a quiet registry office on a drizzly Tuesday and got married with a borrowed ring and a witness who sold photocopies across the street. Then, four months after the hush of that yes, they broke—cleanly in language, messily in practice—and told no one.
Now it's July, and their friend group's annual coastal residency has landed them in the same wide mosquito-netted room at the old telecom bungalow in Prampram they've returned to every year—the Cable House with rusting anchors in the yard and coaxial ghosts in the walls. For one blue-hot week, they run workshops with teenagers and fisherfolk, string LoRa gateways along almond trees, and eat smoky tilapia with banku and too much pepper, while the Atlantic salts everything that isn't nailed down. Only this year, the Cable House has been sold to a developer who wants to turn it into boutique apartments, and this is their last week. Donors are flying in from Nairobi and Shenzhen, a TV crew is sniffing around, and the chief's linguist has promised a libation if their tide gauges don't offend the ancestors.
So they decide to keep pretending. Esi will be the meticulous user researcher with color-coded Post-its who never raises her voice; Kojo will be the unflappable hardware whisperer whose jokes make the room forget the crackle in the wiring. They will label dataloggers together, fall into their old call-and-response during community meetings, take the same selfies they always post, and share the big bed without sleeping as if that has ever been easy. Their friends—Naa, Selasie, Kobby, Zinzi—are too clever not to notice the lag between what is said and what is lived, but collective rituals are tender things, and nobody wants to be the one to end summer.
Across seven days of glare and brackish wind, while a salinity sensor throws a stubborn bug and a paper deadline stalks Esi's inbox, the script frays. Kojo is mourning the father he could not translate back into his life; Esi is afraid of a future that might require her to be both seen and chosen. As the bungalow empties and the shoreline inches closer, Secret Wedding asks whether two people can prototype a future while pretending they already shipped it—and what it costs to make the people you love believe in your best story. After years of building together, how hard can it be to fake it for one last week on a fragile edge, when the data, and their hearts, refuse to smooth their noise.
My quick take after finishing.
Net result is measured, uneven, memorable in place more than passion.
If the quiet, coastal intimacy of Kwaku Mensima's "Salt Flats" and the maker-scene tenderness of Ama Nketsia's "Wiring the Wind" appeal to you, this will likely land. The romance is subdued, the tech is specific, and the friendships carry much of the warmth.
It is not showy, and the restraint sometimes curdles into distance, but the setting work and procedural detail give it a distinct lane.
I came for a knotty romance and left with a stack of tidy Post-its where a heart should be.
The book talks about building sensors, drafting emails, calibrating salinity like the sea will hand over permission slips. Where is the hunger, the heat, the risk of telling the truth when the room is full of people who have believed you for years?
The central conceit asks them to "build a future while acting like it is already shipped," but the story will not stop itemizing field kits. I do not need a parts list to feel a pulse.
Every time the TV crew wanders in or a donor lands from afar, the romance shrinks. The last week at the Cable House should sting. Instead it fidgets.
I wanted a bruise, a confession, a cut that does not heal overnight. What I got was a careful rehearsal that mistook choreography for choice.
What worked for me was the atmosphere. The rusting anchors in the yard, the almond trees wired with LoRa gateways, the photocopy stall across from the registry office that lingers like a private joke, all of it feels lived in and lightly uncanny.
Prampram's shoreline presses forward, the Cable House creaks, and the chief's linguist hovers with ritual and side-eye. The community workshops with teenagers and fisherfolk add scale to the stakes, so the looming developer is more than a plot device.
Esi and Kojo feel both known and far away.
Their banter is alive in community meetings and those prickly bedtime negotiations, yet when it is time to let us into their fears, the curtain sticks. Kojo's grief is named but not fully inhabited, and Esi's caution reads as vagueness instead of choice.
I believed they had history, but I struggled to believe they had a present.
The novel organizes itself by days, a neat scaffold that mirrors the residency calendar. Chapters toggle between Esi's research notes and scene work, and the rhythm can be pleasing when workshops bleed into late-night labeling and emails.
Still, the voice often retreats into logistics; long sequences of setup and teardown slow the momentum, and several lovely sentences about light and salt drift past without anchoring the central conflict. When the prose relaxes into dialogue, it hums.
A week at the Cable House sounds electric, yet the plot ebbs until the last pages. The secret marriage setup keeps getting sidelined by gear checks and donor visits, so the tension never quite sparks.
