Selected by Amaud Jamaul Johnson for the 2023 Jake Adam York Prize, Yalie Saweda Kamara’s Besaydoo is an elegantly wrought love song to home—as place, as people, as body, and as language.

What does it feel like to wake up in the Panopticon? It's like waking up for the first time ever. It's like waking up with a third eye." When Moremi connects her brain to the Panopticon, a network which allows you to see inside the minds and dreams of others, she believes that it will save her from depression, loneliness and, eventually, death. That is until she meets Orpheus. Orpheus was brought up in isolation by a Neo-luddite father.

Band 1: Onyekas Superkraft

Der renommierte Schwarze Wissenschaftler und Aktivist W.E.B. Du Bois schrieb 1920 „The Comet“ als die Welt sich von der „Spanischen Grippe“ zu erholen versuchte. 100 Jahre später gewinnt seine spekulative Kurzgeschichte an neuer Bedeutung: „The Comet“ legte nicht nur die Weichen für das transdisziplinäre Phänomen des Afrofuturismus 2.0, sondern weist auch den Weg aus der „Corona-Krise“ hin zu einer antirassistischen Zukunft. Zweisprachige Ausgabe Deutsch/Englisch. ***

Lilith Iyapo ist in den Anden, als der Atomkrieg beginnt, der die Erde zerstört. Jahrhunderte später erwacht sie an Bord eines Raumschiffs der mysteriösen Oankali. Die Aliens haben die überlebenden Menschen von der verseuchten Erde geholt und sie in einen Kälteschlaf versetzt. Anschließend studierten die Oankali die Erde und ihre Bewohner und retteten den Planeten. Und sie vermischten menschliche DNA mit ihrer eigenen.

Band 1: Goldener Zorn

Into a white millionaire's Caribbean mansion comes Jadine, a sophisticated graduate of the Sorbonne, art historian – a black American now living in Paris and Rome. Then there’s Son, a criminal on the run, uneducated, violent, contemptuous – a young American black of extreme beauty from small-town Florida. As Morrison follows their affair, she charts all the nuances of obligation and betrayal between blacks and whites, masters and servants, and men and women.   ***

As young girls, Nel and Sula shared each other's secrets and dreams in the poor black mid-West of their childhood. Then Sula ran away to live her dreams and Nel got married. Ten years later Sula returns and no one, least of all Nel, trusts her. Sula is a story of fear – the fear that traps us, justifying itself through perpetual myth and legend. Cast as a witch by the people who resent her strength, Sula is a woman of uncompromising power, a wayward force who challenges the smallness of a world that tries to hold her down.

With supreme skill and reverence, capturing shards, stillness and chaos, Fatin Abbas delivers a novel that gallops close and parallel to current events in Sudan. A dynamic, beautifully orchestrated debut novel connecting five characters caught in the crosshairs of conflict on the Sudanese border.

EDGE OF HERE is a collection of stories that explore contemporary womanhood, with a storytelling sensibility that cleverly combines the modern-day with speculative concepts both ancient and futuristic.