African Magical Realism

Since her encounter with Ori years ago, Jessica has continued her mission to print the truth that the world needs to hear. This pursuit has led her to meet with a source, Zach Carver, a leading mind at Singularity Group. The meeting goes awry, and Jessica awakens to find that she has a gap in time and memory and that Zach is now missing. To her surprise, Ori reappears to help her. His solution involves a promising young recruit, Malik, whose research could be the key to recovering Zach. Yet the forces they are up against have proven they will go to great lengths to remove any obstacle.

Gone Like Yesterday follows two Black women—Zahra, a listless college prep coach, and Sammie, a teenage girl and budding activist soon off to college—who are drawn to each other through the songs of gypsy moths. Gypsy moths have been singing the songs of Zahra’s ancestors to her for years, so when Zahra realizes that Sammie might be a moth person too, their paths become intertwined. Then, the unthinkable happens: Zahra’s brother, Derrick, goes missing.

A group of women contemplate violence after they’re sent into foreign territory to make husbands of the enemy. A support network of traumatized joggers meets to discuss the bodies they’ve found on their runs. And a town replaces its Confederate monument with a rotating cast of local residents. Slippery but muscular, sly but electric, this stunning debut collection moves from horror to magical realism to satire with total authority. In these stories, characters build and remake their sense of home, be it with one another or within themselves.

A Ghanaian journalist based in the US returns to Ghana with a few friends for the holidays in December 2019. That month is meant to be the climax of the Ghanaian government’s year-long "Year of Return" initiative, commemorating 400 years since the first slaves from West Africa arrived in Virginia. "The Year of Return" takes on a whole new meaning when large numbers of ghosts—formerly enslaved Africans who drowned during the Middle Passage—emerge from the Atlantic Ocean, leading to months of global pandemonium, and concluding with a series of vengeful homicides.

Gabrielle LeRoux was just like any other girl, focused on her academics and other normal teenage angst. That is, until her 18th birthday, where she inherits her powers and finds out she's a witch! She discovers that she is part of a long line of witches that descended from West Africa. They have the power to control the elements at will, breathe life into anything they wish, as well as take it away. The source of their magic comes from the melanin only their kind possess in their skin, absorbed from the sun and radiating through their bodies.