African Fantasy

Lace, white, everything frilly and pretty. The theme to Sara’s life used to be that of a princess, one she romanticized. But when her previously perfect world turned upside down, Sara became convinced that she was cursed. She hid herself in the shadows to spare others from the agony she brought along. The only person she could never hide from was her adopted brother.

Arrow Nez is all about that pack life. If it's not about the pack or his business, it's not about him. He's put in a lot of work to prove himself to his pack and his adopted father after an indiscretion that was punishable by death. Childhood trauma has broken him to the point of feeling incapable of loving and being loved. When a beautiful stranger stumbles onto tribal land there are more questions than answers. Who is she? Where has she come from? The most important question is, will she be the iron needed to mend a broken Arrow?

A thousand years into the future, a Black elite class reigns while the underclass toils at their feet. With her society’s future hanging in the balance, young Avi Jore enters into an arranged marriage. But the ceremony turns violent when the servants rebel and kill Avi’s father. In the aftermath of General Jore’s death, Avi and her sister Jade vie for power in a vicious contest. As the rightful heir, Avi has no choice but to defend what’s hers—at any cost. With her loyalties tested and her enemies closing in, Avi must rely on her sister Saige, who searches for allies outside the Union’s walls.

Tiffany is trapped in a life she never wanted for herself. The man she fell in love with turned out to be a lazy, good-for-nothing womanizer. Night after night Tiffany comes home to Blake’s physical, mental, and verbal abuse. She’s tried leaving it in the past, but somehow he always finds her. Each time, she comes back and convinces herself things will get better. Then one day Blake beats her for the last time. Tiffany decides death is the only way out - and she’s not the one being buried. Her life takes a drastic turn as she attempts to live the life she’s always wanted.

There is a vampire war brewing in the underworld and at the center of it all is Damali Richards, spoken word artist and Vampire Huntress. But she is not just any Vampire Huntress, she is the millenium Neteru: a woman so potentially powerful that the vampire world is about to invoke a bloody battle that threatens to spill over onto her streets in order to possess her. It's just a matter of who will get to her first.

Washington D. C., 1925. Clara Johnson talks to spirits, a gift that saved her during her darkest moments in a Washington D. C. jail. Now a curse that’s left her indebted to the cunning spirit world. So, when the Empress, the powerful spirit who holds her debt, offers her an opportunity to gain her freedom, a desperate Clara seizes the chance. The task: steal a magical ring from the wealthiest woman in the District.

Off the coast of West Africa, decades after the dangerous rise of the Atlantic Ocean, the region’s survivors live inside five partially submerged, kilometers-high towers originally created as a playground for the wealthy. Now the towers’ most affluent rule from their lofty perch at the top while the rest are crammed into the dark, fetid floors below sea level.

Now a guardian in training, Maya spends her days patching up veils with her father and cleaning up near-disasters like baby wormholes that her erratic powers create. But when Maya and her friends discover that something went terribly wrong during their journey to bring her father back to the human world, they are forced to return to The Dark and restore what they left behind, the one thing keeping the veil from falling: her father’s soul.

As students at university of Makhanda, South Africa during the #RUReferenceList campaign, Langa and her lover Khwezi have a passionate and complex relationship. Puzzling gaps in her memory haunt Langa, yet her dreams are vivid with colors and symbols that hint at a nightmare of forgotten violations and losses. So many secrets—and Langa has had enough of secrets and silences. Who can she turn to? Her mother? Her grandmother? Khwezi? Or herself?

This exciting collection presents two previously unpublished stories by SF legend Octavia E. Butler. A Necessary Being precedes the events of Survivor, Butler's third (famously disowned) installment in her Patternist series, and includes characters from it, focusing exclusively on the Kohn, aliens who build their social hierarchies on the blueness of their fur. In Childfinder, a black woman with the gift of identifying children with latent psychic ability refuses to share her skill with an organization of white telepaths.

Laila desperately wants to become a mother, but each of her previous pregnancies has ended in heartbreak. This time has to be different, so she turns to the Melancons, an old and powerful Harlem family known for their caul, a precious layer of skin that is the secret source of their healing power. When a deal for Laila to acquire a piece of caul falls through, she is heartbroken, but when the child is stillborn, she is overcome with grief and rage. What she doesn't know is that a baby will soon be delivered—by her niece, Amara—and delivered to the Melancons to raise as their own.

A revolution has swept through the islands of Hans Lollik, and former slave Loren Jannik has been chosen to lead the survivors in a bid to free the islands forever. But the rebels are running out of food, weapons, and options. And as the Fjern inch closer to reclaiming Hans Lollik with every battle, Loren is faced with a choice that could shift the course of the revolution in their favor - or doom it to failure.

Abandoned by her family, alone on the wrong side of the color line with little to call her own, Eliza Meeks is coming to terms with what she does have. It’s a gift for communicating with animals. To some, she’s a magical tender. To others, a she-devil. To a talent prospector, she’s a crowd-drawing oddity. And the Bacchanal Carnival is Eliza’s ticket out of the swamp trap of Baton Rouge. Among fortune-tellers, carnies, barkers, and folks even stranger than herself, Eliza finds a new home. But the Bacchanal is no ordinary carnival. An ancient demon has a home there too.

Lore Alemeyu wakes up to discover she’s on a ship in the middle of the ocean. Held prisoner and with no way to escape, she’s faced with a dire set of circumstances… A crew that’s distrustful of Lore’s magic capabilities… Her betrayal by a Fae she thought she could trust… A dangerous quest for the sun book, which, if placed in the wrong hands, will make the Alytherian Fae even more powerful. Lore must navigate threats on the ship and beyond, into the ocean’s magical and mysterious depths, in order to find the sun book herself and help free the humans.

MEM is a rare novel, a small book carrying very big ideas, the kind of story that stays with you long after you've finished listening to it. Set in the glittering art deco world of a century ago, MEM makes one slight alteration to history: a scientist in Montreal discovers a method allowing people to have their memories extracted from their minds, whole and complete.

Shallow Waters imagines Yemaya, an Orïsha—a deity in the religion of Africa’s Yoruba people—cast into mid-1800s America. We meet Yemaya as a young woman, still in the care of her mother and not yet fully aware of the spectacular power she possesses to protect herself and those she holds dear.

With the end of Alistair Sorenson’s tyrannical reign, Dèmi has accepted Jonas’s proposal to rule as his Queen with hopes to finally free her people, the magical Oluso. Yet social prejudice, corrupt council members, and the continued distrust of the nonmagical Ajès throughout the kingdom prove seemingly implacable obstacles. To make matters worse, Dèmi struggles to control her newly awakened iron blood magic. As Ekwensi’s rebel army—led in part by Colin, her best friend and one-time lover—become more triumphant in their mission, war seems inevitable.

This playful and hip fantasy is the tale of a utopian city, where residents can attend St. Pimp's House of Baptist Rapture, and the candidates for mayor battle to determine who the better DJ is. Into this wonderful place comes Cadillac Jackson, a journalist who falls for the beautiful and magical Mahogany Sunflower - whose family members can fly.

When twelve-year-old Rory applies for a job at a spooky old mansion in his gloomy seaside town, he finds the owner, Lord Foxglove, odd and unpleasant. But he and his mom need the money, so he takes the job anyway. Rory soon finds out that his new boss is not just strange, he’s not even human—and he’s trying to steal the townspeople’s shadows.

Ropa Moyo’s ghost-talking practice has tanked. Desperate for money to pay bills and look after her family, she reluctantly accepts a job to look into the history of a coma patient receiving treatment at the magical private hospital Our Lady of Mysterious Ailments. The patient is a teenage schoolboy called Max Wu, and healers at the hospital are baffled by the illness which has confounded medicine and magic.