You will feel, in your body, the specific ache of a wrong held privately and faithfully across four generations — the exhausting discipline of "keeping the record true" when no one official is listening — and the harder, riskier, unglamorous relief of watching a sliver of it corrected, by degrees, never all at once, never completely.
The Provenance Novels · Cover revealed
The Gatekeeper's Daughters
A record of those this hospital did not think worth recording correctly* — the line Ida Broome wrote on the first page of a hidden notebook in 1904, four generations before her descendant forces a canal authority to finally read it (ch 01:57, ch 21).
The canal remembers ships, tonnage, and dates. Ida Broome kept the names.
The story
What waits inside
In 1904, Barbadian nurse Ida Broome arrives in the Panama Canal Zone to work in a segregated fever hospital. The official ledgers misspell West Indian workers, reduce them to numbers, or omit them entirely. So Ida begins a record of her own.
Hidden among medical supplies, her ledger preserves the names, injuries, and truths an engineering triumph has no room to hold. When loss reaches Ida's family, the book becomes more than an archive. It becomes unfinished work.
Across a century, it passes through women who refuse to let that work disappear: an organizer fighting for compensation, a teacher drawn into Panama's struggle for sovereignty, and Simone James, one of the modern canal's senior pilots.
After inheriting the ledger, Simone discovers that the official history still repeats an old lie. Correcting it means challenging the institution in which she has earned her standing and asking a nation proud of reclaiming the canal to reopen the wounds of the American era.
As the lock gates close behind the ships she guides, Simone must choose how much she will risk to bring the people who built them into public memory, one correctly spelled name at a time.
A sweeping multigenerational novel about labor, inheritance, and the women who keep history from forgetting who built its monuments.
In the segregated Panama Canal Zone and its complicated, proudly post-1999 Panamanian aftermath, official institutions decide whose labor earns a correctly spelled name in the historical record — and one family of women keeps a private, truer ledger, generation after generation, until it is finally strong enough, and public enough, to force a correction.
A true record, kept faithfully but privately, is not yet justice — it becomes justice only when someone in the next generation is willing to risk something real to make it public, and even then the correction that results is partial, dated, and never finished. Editorial note (retrofit honesty, not a redesign):** this book states versions of its own theme aloud, repeatedly, in dialogue — Ida's "I don't know that faithful keeping, on its own, was ever going to be enough" (ch 07); Connie's "a foothold is not nothing" "It's not everything" (ch 20–21). This is a structural choice of the saga form (each generation hands the thesis to the next, explicitly, the way an heirloom is handed down), not a departure the retrofit is flagging as a defect — but it is more directly voiced than the "earned, never stated" ideal in the v2 template, and a future revision pass may want to weigh whether any of these lines should be cut back toward implication. Reported, not fixed here.
Interior previews
First pages arriving soon
When manuscript pages are ready, they will appear here as a lightweight gallery — designed for fast loading, sharp type, and quiet immersion.