Our regular Book Digest segment spotlights new books from Kacen Callender, Akwaeke Emezi, Andile Cele, and Marcia Douglas.
Chaos King by Kacen Callender
Publisher: Tor Teen
Date: April 15, 2025
Genre: Fiction
Language: English
Where to find it: Bookshop.org, Macmillan
Kacen Callender
Kacen Callender is the bestselling and award-winning author of multiple novels for children, teens, and adults, including the Stonewall Honor Book Felix Ever After and the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature winner King and the Dragonflies. Their adult fantasy, Queen of the Conquered, was a World Fantasy Award 2020 winner for Best Novel, named one of the 100 Best Fantasy Novels of All Time by Time Magazine and one of the 50 Best Fantasy Novels of All Time by Esquire.
Chaos King
WHEN THE WORLD BURNS, ASH WILL RISE.
The explosive sequel to instant New York Times bestselling YA debut Infinity Alchemist by Kacen Callender.
The hardcover edition features a beautiful jacket with silver foil, a case stamp, an in-world map and illustrated endpapers.
Ever since he rose up against his father and saved New Anglia from destruction, Ash has been struggling to adapt to his new life. He has nightmares every night, haunted by strange black orbs and his screaming dead mother. Ash is sure she’s trying to warn him that the world is still in danger, and becomes determined to find a way to speak to her again—but communicating with the dead isn’t easy, even for an alchemist as powerful as Ash.
It doesn’t help that violent anti-alchemist sentiment is spreading across New Anglia. When Ash is captured by a radical group, inspired by his father’s legacy, he must decide if alchemist rights can be trusted in the hands of the Houses, along with his partners Callum and Ramsay—or if Ash must follow the path his father laid for him, and become the leader of an alchemist revolution.
Can Ash keep his relationships together and stop the world from falling apart?
Somadina by Akwaeke Emezi
Publisher: Knopf Books for Young Readers
Date: April 15, 2025
Genre: Fiction
Language: English
Where to find it: Bookshop.org, Penguin Random House
Akwaeke Emezi
Akwaeke Emezi is the author of many books for both teens and adults. These include: Pet, a finalist for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, a Walter Honor Book and a Stonewall Honor Book; Bitter, a YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults Pick; the New York Times bestseller The Death of Vivek Oji, which was a finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize; Freshwater, which was named a New York Times Notable Book and shortlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award; Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir; and most recently You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty. Selected as a 5 Under 35 honoree by the National Book Foundation, they are based in liminal spaces.
Somadina
From the National Book Award finalist and author of Pet comes a novel set in a magical West African world, about a teen girl who must save her missing twin while learning to navigate her own terrifying new powers.
Somadina and her twin brother, Jayaike, are practically the same person: they finish each other’s sentences and make each other whole. When the twins come of age, their magical gifts begin to develop, but while Jayaike’s powers enchant, Somadina’s cause fear to ripple through her town.
Always an outsider, Somadina now faces blatant–and dangerous–hostility. And things go from bad to worse when her brother—the one person she trusted—vanishes. Somadina knows that no matter the dangers, she must track him down. Even if it means entering the Sacred Forest. Even if it means grueling, otherworldly travel she may not survive. Even if it means finding the hidden places where those closest to the spirit world don’t dare to go. Does Somadina have the strength –within both her body and her soul — for the trying journey ahead?
National Book Award finalist Akwaeke Emezi masterfully weaves a tale of family, identity, and the power of the past, in a world where the extraordinary is ordinary.
Braids and Migraines by Andile Cele
Publisher: Holland House Books
Date: April 17, 2025
Genre: Fiction
Language: English
Where to find it: Holland House Books
Andile Cele
Andile has a degree in Journalism from the Tshwane University of Technology, and a Creative Writing and Theory of Literature degree from the University of South Africa. She is an MA candidate at Stellenbosch University, and is the current holder of the Gwen Knowles-Williams Bursary, administered by the English Academy of Southern Africa. Her short fiction has been published in Botsotso and Short.Sharp.Stories.
Braids and Migraines
When Nomandla is awarded a scholarship to attend the prestigious Cameron House for Girls in Durban, she thinks her life will improve. Instead it falls apart.
Growing up in Ziyabuya township, Nomandla battles poverty, racism, and her own mental health. She is pursued by visions which result in her being hospitalised, and is then made to accompany her father on Saturdays to his gardening job at the home of the Smith family. It is here that she first encounters Casey, a girl who will play a significant role in turning her life upside down, destroying her hope of a better future. Meanwhile, at Cameron House, Nomandla learns that, as a scholarship girl, she is expected to showcase gratitude as well as her culture, being regarded as little more than a display of transformation, unity and acceptance. Unfortunately, the reality is very different.
Andile Cele’s beautiful debut novel considers the complexities around identity, its ties to shame, grief, and to South Africa’s painful history. Braids & Migraines follows Nomandla as she comes to a place of personal understanding and acceptance, without compromise.
The Jamaica Kollection of the Shante Dream Arkive by Marcia Douglas
Publisher: New Directions
Date: April 22, 2025
Genre: Fiction
Language: English
Where to find it: New Directions
Marcia Douglas
Marcia Douglas was born in the U.K., and grew up in Kingston, Jamaica. The author of novels, poems, and essays, she is the recipient of awards and fellowships from Creative Capital, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Whiting Foundation, and a UK Poetry Book Society Recommendation. The Marvellous Equations of the Dread was longlisted for the 2016 Republic of Consciousness Prize and the 2017 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. She is a College Professor of Distinction at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
The Jamaica Kollection of the Shante Dream Arkive
Zooming into tight focus on present-day life and dashing deep into the past in turns, the pace is fast and fierce in The Jamaica Kollection of the Shante Dream Arkive, which continues Marcia Douglas’s “speculative ancestral project” (The Whiting Foundation). The Shante Dream Arkive brings alive a mosaic of characters—all searching through history for something or someone lost to the island: a mother searches for her missing child through time and space; an undocumented migrant struggles with loss while living in the US; a youth wanders through dream-gates seeking liberation and the lost parts of himself. And one key to the whole is Zora Neale Hurston’s left-behind camera. Each chapter opens like an aperture onto another aspect of the dream story. And each and every potent dream story contains the spirit, beauty, and riddim of Jamaica:
For things happen below sea that have never been told. There is wheelin there and turnin; and far-far down past brochure azure, cerulean and indigo, there is a vast dark ink and vortices of voices caught up in such a trumpet of rah-&-glory bottomsea sound as to move earth’s axis. And after that, more ink blue, and cobalt and sapphire and a calm-calm wata—velvet and kin to the moon brand new. The monk seals dare not go this far. But the spirits do.
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