Our regular Book Digest segment spotlights new books by Nicole Glover, Jide Salawu, Eugen Bacon, Cheryl S. Ntumy, Stephen Embleton, and Alpha Kamara.
The Star Seekers by Nicole Glover
Publisher: Harper Voyager
Publication Date: January 6, 2026
Genre: Fiction
Language: English
Where to find it: Nicole Glover Website, Harper Collins
Nicole Glover
Nicole Glover is the author of The Conductors and The Undertakers as well as The Improvisers in the Murder and Magic series. When she’s not writing, she’s working as a UX researcher in Virginia where her knowledge about murder and other mysteries is surprisingly useful.
The Star Seekers
Cynthia Rhodes, a brilliant arcane engineer at NASA’s Ainsworth Research Labs has her eyes fixed on the stars. Talented in math and magic, when she’s not working to get astronauts to the moon, she hosts a magical educational show… a job she took mostly for a chance to regularly see the dashing Theodore Danner, a professor of arcane archeology.
When a cursed museum curator nearly interrupts a broadcast of their show, Cynthia finds an eager sleuthing partner in Theo. Pairing up, they begin investigating the strange behavior of the curator and a mysterious theft at the arcane history museum—until one of Cynthia’s own coworkers perishes right in front of her in a major lab accident that endangers Ainsworth’s role in the space race.
Certain it was murder instead of an accident, Cynthia sees this as a separate case at first. However the more she and Theo investigate, Cynthia uncovers a surprising link between the two incidents. The museum theft and murder are part of a larger equation—one that includes deadly enchantments, rumored pirate treasure, a peculiar plant, and a dire threat to the space program as well as everything she holds dear.
Contraband Bodies by Jide Salawu
Publisher: NeWest Press
Date: October 1, 2025
Genre: Poetry
Language: English.
Where to find it: NeWest Press
Jide Salawu
Jide Salawu is the author of Preface for Leaving Homeland, published under the African Poetry Book Fund, and the co-editor of African Urban Echoes, published by Griots Lounge Canada. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Fiddlehead, Walrus, Poetry Pause, Literary Review of Canada, Prairie Schooner, Rattle, Transition, and so on. He was a Yosef Wosk Fellow and the recipient of the James Patrick Folinsbee Award for Creative Writing at the University of Alberta. Salawu grew up in Shao, Nigeria, but currently lives in Edmonton, Canada, where he teaches as an assistant lecturer at the English and Film Studies program of the University of Alberta.
Contraband Bodies
Contraband Bodies is a debut to be reckoned with. Jide Salawu shines in this personal record of migratory travails and a country lost to precarious politics. A conscious elegy of displacement and home regained through the tribute of roads, evoking diasporic conditions by highlighting syncopated language through pixelated imagery and lapidary details the diverse circumstances of being a Black migrant in Africa, Europe, and America. Contraband Bodies is a cogitation on the agony of Atlantic memories and dispersal. It confronts new forms of digital kinship activated through social waves across diasporic landscape. In Contraband Bodies, Salawu performs a poetic remittance on current exodus within Africa and outside of it as a form of resistance against all forms of oppression against Black migrant subjects in the world today.
La Rage De Celui Qui De Vient Loin by Alpha Kamara
Publisher: Editions L’Harmattan
Publication Date: January 8, 2026
Genre: Fiction
Language: French
Where to find it: Editions L’Harmattan
Alpha Kamara
Alpha Camara was born on April 14, 1986, in Mamou, Guinea, the son of a railway worker and a homemaker. Alpha trained as a biological laboratory technician, having earned his degree from the University Center of Kindia. Lacking opportunities in his field, he turned to entrepreneurship, forging his own path in the construction industry. Married and a father of three, he lives in Conakry with his family.
La Rage De Celui Qui Vient De Loin (English: The rage of one who comes from afar)
“The Rage of One Who Comes From Afar ” recounts the moving journey of a young Guinean man born into poverty, confronted early on with hardship but sustained by unwavering determination. While clandestine exile claimed the lives of many of his loved ones, Alpha made a different choice: to stay, to learn, to fight, and to build. Through a vibrant narrative, he reveals the quiet strength, dignity, and resilience of a man who never gave up. Far from stereotypes, this book gives voice to a generation of young Africans who believe in their future on their own land. Between school, business, entrepreneurship, and daily challenges, Alpha forges a new path: that of courage rooted in reality. The story of a man who could have left, but who chose instead to build where many had lost hope.
Sauuti Terrors edited by Eugen Bacon, Stephen Embleton, Cheryl S. Ntumy
Publisher: Flame Tree Collections
Publication Date: February 17, 2026
Genre: Fiction, Speculative Fiction
Language: English,
Where to find it: Amazon, Saauti Terrors
Eugen Bacon
Eugen Bacon is an African Australian author. She’s a British Fantasy and Foreword Indies Award winner, a twice World Fantasy Award finalist, and a finalist in the Shirley Jackson, Philip K. Dick, Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, and the Nommo Awards for speculative fiction by Africans. Eugen was announced in the Honor List of the Otherwise Fellowships for ‘doing exciting work in gender and speculative fiction’. Danged Black Thing made the Otherwise Award Honor List as a ‘sharp collection of Afro-Surrealist work’. Visit her at eugenbacon.com.
Cheryl S. Ntumy
Cheryl S. Ntumy is a Ghanaian writer of short fiction and novels of speculative fiction, young adult fiction, and romance. Her work has appeared in FIYAH Literary Magazine; Apex Magazine; World Literature Today; Best of World SF Vol. 3 and Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction 2022, among others. Her work has also been nominated for the Nommo Award for African Speculative Fiction, the British Science Fiction Association Award, the Commonwealth Writers Short Story Prize and the Miles Morland Foundation Scholarship. She is part of the Sauútiverse Collective, which created a shared universe for Afrocentric speculative fiction, and a member of Petlo Literary Arts, an organisation that develops and promotes creative writing in Botswana.
Stephen Embleton
Stephen Embleton was born in South Africa and is now a resident in Oxford, after his 2022 academic fellowship at the African Studies Centre, University of Oxford. Stephen was awarded a literary grant by the Royal Literary Fund in 2024, recognising the literary merit of his body of work and literature-related activities. Stephen was the editor of The James Currey Anthology 2022, featuring short fiction and non-fiction from the African continent and in the diaspora. Stephen was the editor of the 2023 edition of the posthumously published final novel of Flora Nwapa, The Lake Goddess.
Sauúti Terrors Short Stories (Beyond and Within)
A powerful dark science fiction collection in a stunning edition, bringing back the revolutionary Afrocentric Sauútiverse.
Co-editors Eugen Bacon, Stephen Embleton and Cheryl S. Ntumy bring us a powerful and haunting collection of short stories from the groundbreaking Sauútiverse, following the success of Mothersound: The Sauútiverse Anthology. Sauúti Terrors tells of the doomed, the damned, the shunned, the cunning, the destroyers, the noxious, and more, in the worlds of the living, the in-between and the dead. Unravel the darkest stories in the deepest parts of the Sauúti five-planet system with its two suns, and orbiting a binary star.
Bringing together African and African diaspora writers, the collection features five-time Bram Stoker Award winner and recipient of the Bram Stoker Lifetime Achievement Award Linda D. Addison and other prominent speculative fiction authors, including T.L. Huchu, Xan van Rooyen, Jamal Hodge, Ishola Abdulwasiu Ayodele, Wole Talabi, Mazi Nwonwu, Kofi Nyameye, D.S. Falowo, Shingai Njeri Kagunda, J. Umeh, Moustapha Mbacké Diop, Miguel O. Mitchell, DaVaun Sanders and Nerine Dorman.
The Flame Tree Beyond and Within short story collections bring together tales of myth and imagination by modern and contemporary writers, carefully selected by anthologists, and sometimes featuring short stories from a single author. Overall, the series presents a wide range of diverse and inclusive voices with myth, folkloric-inflected short fiction, and an emphasis on the supernatural, science fiction, the mysterious and the speculative. The books themselves are gorgeous, with foiled covers, printed edges, and published only in hardcover editions, offering a lifetime of reading pleasure.
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