By fate and fire, a being four millennia old is reborn in Mali in a short story of contemporary African life and ancient secrets by the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author of the Binti trilogy.
Issaka has returned home to Timbouctou and a devastating al-Qaeda raid. His only hope for survival is Faro, a stunning, blue-beaded supernatural entity who rises free from the flames of her imprisoning book as it burns. Compelled to follow Faro, Issaka is opening his eyes to their shared history and the ancestral wisdom of his own past.
Nnedi Okorafor's The Black Pages is part of Black Stars, a multi-dimensional collection of speculative fiction from Black authors. Each story is a world much like our own. Read or listen to them in a single sitting.
***
May your ancestors punish you!
***
(Amazon Original Stories, 31 August 2021, ebook, 31 pages, borrowed from @AmazonKindle, #PrimeReading)
***
***
This is a new author for me. I already added the Binti trilogy to my TBR list because I heard so many good things about it before I picked this up. This was a fantastic read and I'm looking forward to discovering more of this author. There's so much packed into The Black Pages and it often felt like I was reading something with the scope of a novel. I loved the premise of this, an ancient goddess released when a book is accidentally burned and the ramification for Issaka. This is a terrific tale. I loved it.
