Our regular Book Digest segment spotlights new books from Baalu Girma, Canisia Lubrin, Daniel Black, and Ibi Zoboi.
Oromay by Baalu Girma
Publisher: Soho Press
Date: February 4, 2025
Genre: Fiction
Language: English (Translated from Amharic)
Where to find it: Penguin Random House,
Baalu Girma
Baalu Girma was one of Ethiopia’s greatest writers and Oromay was his most famous novel. He began his career as a journalist in Ethiopia, eventually becoming both a well-known novelist and a top official in the Ministry of Information under the Derg dictatorship. He based Oromay on the real-life Red Star Campaign, a failed government effort to crush the long-running Eritrean insurgency. Its unflattering portrait of the regime caused the book to be banned and Girma to be fired. He vanished on Valentine’s Day 1984, likely kidnapped and murdered by the Derg.
Translators
David DeGusta
David DeGusta is a writer and translator based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He earned an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he received the 2023 Henfield Prize, and was a 2024 MacDowell Fellow. Previously, he worked as a paleoanthropologist in Ethiopia.
Mesfin Felleke Yirgu
Mesfin Felleke Yirgu was born and raised in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, with Amharic as his native language. He has been involved with the Baalu Girma Foundation since its founding and is a long-time friend of the Girma family.
Oromay
A journalist finds himself embroiled in a disastrous government campaign as well as a sweeping romance in this landmark English translation of Ethiopia’s most famous novel.
An engrossing political thriller and a tale of love and war for readers of John Le Carré and Philip Kerr.
December 1981, Ethiopia. Tsegaye Hailemaryam, a well-known journalist for the state-run media, has just landed in Asmara. He is on assignment as the head of propaganda for the Red Star campaign, a massive effort by the Ethiopian government to end the Eritrean insurgency. There, amid the city’s bars and coffeehouses buzzing with spies and government agents, he juggles the demands of his superiors while trying to reassure his fiancée back home that he’s not straying with Asmara’s famed beauties.
As Tsegaye falls in love with Asmara—and, in spite of his promises, with dazzling, enigmatic local woman Fiammetta—his misgivings about the campaign grow. Tsegaye confronts the horror of war when he is sent with an elite army unit to attack the insurgents’ mountain stronghold. In the aftermath, he encounters betrayals that shake his faith in both the regime and human nature.
Oromay became an instant sensation when first published in 1983 and was swiftly banned for its frank depiction of the regime. The author vanished soon thereafter; the consensus is that he was murdered in retaliation for Oromay. A sweeping and timeless story about power and betrayal in love and war, the novel remains Girma’s masterpiece.
Code Noir by Canisia Lubrin
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Date: February 4, 2025
Genre: Fiction
Language: English
Where to find it: Soft Skull Press
Canisia Lubrin
Canisia Lubrin’s books include Voodoo Hypothesis and The Dyzgraphxst. Lubrin’s work has been recognized with the Griffin Poetry Prize, OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the OCM Bocas Prize for Poetry, the Derek Walcott Prize, the Writer’s Trust of Canada Rising Stars prize, and others. Also a finalist for the Trillium Award for Poetry and Governor General’s Literary Award, Lubrin has held fellowships at the Banff Centre, Civitella Ranieri in Italy, Simon Fraser University, Literature Colloquium Berlin, Queen’s University, and Victoria College at University of Toronto. She studied at York University and the University of Guelph, where she now coordinates the Creative Writing MFA in the School of English & Theatre Studies. In 2021, Lubrin received a Windham-Campbell prize for poetry, and the Globe & Mail named her Poet of the Year. Born in St. Lucia, Lubrin now lives in Whitby, Ontario, and is poetry editor at McClelland & Stewart.
Code Noir
Canisia Lubrin’s debut fiction is that rare work of art—a brilliant, startlingly original book that combines immense literary and political force. Its structure, deceptively simple, is based on the infamous Code Noir, a set of real historical decrees originally passed in 1685 by King Louis XIV of France defining the conditions of slavery in the French colonial empire. The original code had fifty-nine articles; Code Noir has fifty-nine linked fictions—vivid, unforgettable, multilayered fragments filled with globe-wise characters who desire to live beyond the ruins of the past.
Accompanied by black-and-white drawings—one at the start of each fiction—by acclaimed visual artist Torkwase Dyson, and with a foreword by Christina Sharpe, Code Noir ranges in style from contemporary realism to dystopian literature, from futuristic fantasy to historical fiction. This inventive, shape-shifting braid of narratives exists far beyond the boundaries of an official decree.
Isaac’s Song by Daniel Black
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Date: January 14, 2025
Genre: Fiction
Language: English
Where to find it: Harper Collins,
Daniel Black
Daniel Black is an author and professor of African American studies at Clark Atlanta University. His books include The Coming, Perfect Peace and They Tell Me of a Home. He is the winner of the Distinguished Writer Award from the Middle-Atlantic Writer’s Association and has been nominated for the Townsend Prize for Fiction, the Ernest J. Gaines Award, and the Georgia Author of the Year Award. He was raised in Blackwell, Arkansas, and lives in Atlanta, Georgia.
Isaac’s Song
Isaac is at a crossroads in his young life. Growing up in Missouri, the son of a caustic, hard-driving father, he was conditioned to suppress his artistic pursuits and physical desires, notions that didn’t align with a traditional view of masculinity. But now, in late ’80s Chicago, Isaac has finally carved out a life of his own. He is sensitive and tenderhearted and has built up the courage to seek out a community. Yet just as he begins to embrace who he is, two social catalysts—the AIDS crisis and Rodney King’s attack—collectively extinguish his hard-earned joy.
At a therapist’s encouragement, Isaac begins to write down his story. In the process, he taps into a creative energy that will send him on a journey back to his family, his ancestral home in Arkansas and the inherited trauma of the nation’s dark past. But a surprise discovery will either unlock the truths he’s seeking or threaten to derail the life he’s fought so hard to claim.
Poignant, sweeping and luminously told, Isaac’s Song is a return to the beloved characters of Don’t Cry for Me and a high-water mark in the career of an award-winning author.
Skin by Ibi Zoboi
Publisher: Versify
Date: February 11, 2025
Genre: Fiction, Young Adult
Language: English
Where to find it: Harper Collins
Ibi Zoboi
Ibi Zoboi is the New York Times bestselling author of American Street, a National Book Award finalist; Nigeria Jones, a Coretta Scott King Award winner; Pride; My Life as an Ice Cream Sandwich; Okoye to the People: A Black Panther Novel for Marvel; and the Walter Award and LA Times Book Prize–winning Punching the Air, cowritten with Exonerated Five member Yusef Salaam. She is also a two-time Coretta Scott King Honor Award winner for her picture book The People Remember and her middle grade biography of Octavia Butler, Star Child. She is the editor of the anthology Black Enough. Born in Haiti and raised in New York City, she now lives in New Jersey with her family. You can find her online at.
Skin
From award-winning, New York Times bestselling author Ibi Zoboi comes her groundbreaking contemporary fantasy debut—a novel in verse based on Caribbean folklore—about the power of inherited magic and the price we must pay to live the life we yearn for.
“Our new home with its thick walls and locked doors wants me to stay trapped in my skin— but I am fury and flame.”
Fifteen-year-old Marisol is the daughter of a soucouyant. Every new moon, she sheds her skin like the many women before her, shifting into a fireball witch who must fly into the night and slowly sip from the lives of others to sustain her own. But Brooklyn is no place for fireball witches with all its bright lights, shut windows, and bolt-locked doors.… While Marisol hoped they would leave their old traditions behind when they emigrated from the islands, she knows this will never happen while she remains ensnared by the one person who keeps her chained to her magical past—her mother.
Seventeen-year-old Genevieve is the daughter of a college professor and a newly minted older half-sister of twins. Her worsening skin condition and the babies’ constant wailing keep her up at night when she stares at the dark sky with a deep longing to inhale it all. She hopes to quench the hunger that gnaws at her, one that seems to reach for some memory of her estranged mother. When a new nanny arrives to help with the twins, a family secret connecting her to Marisol is revealed, and Gen begins to find answers to questions she hasn’t even thought to ask.
But the girls soon discover that the very skin keeping their flames locked beneath the surface may be more explosive to the relationships around them than any ancient magic.
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