Our regular Book Digest segment spotlights new books by Olufemi Terry, Itamar Vieira Junior, Eugen Bacon, and Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie.
Wilderness of Mirrors by Olufemi Terry
Publisher: Restless Books
Date: September 9, 2025
Genre: Fiction
Language: English
Where to find it: Restless Books
Olufemi Terry
Olufemi Terry is a Sierra Leone-born writer, essayist, and journalist living in Germany and Côte d’Ivoire. His short fiction has been published in The Georgia Review, Guernica, Chimurenga, and The Granta Book of the African Short Story, and translated into French and German. His nonfiction essays have appeared in The American Scholar, Africa is a Country, and The Guardian. He has been the International Writer-in-Residence at Cove Park, Scotland, and a Writer-in-Residence at Georgetown University’s Lannan Center for Poetics & Social Practice in Washington, DC. In 2019, he received a Washington DC Arts & Humanities Grant. A former juror of the Miles Morland Scholarship and the AKO Caine Prize for African writing, he is the 2010 winner of the Caine Prize.
Wilderness of Mirrors
Exquisitely written and deeply absorbing, this debut from Caine Prize–winning author Olufemi Terry captures the heady abandon of early adulthood in a country still reeling from the lasting effects of racial partition and colonialism.
When his father suggests that he take some time off to visit his cousin, Emil―a young surgeon-in-training―doesn’t ask many questions. For reasons he doesn’t yet understand, he sets aside his studies and moves into his aunt’s house in Stadmutter, a remote multiracial African city. There, he is disquieted by days of unaccustomed aimlessness and by encounters with Bolling, a wealthy foreigner who woos him intellectually and sexually, and Tamsin, a psychology student working to define herself against the fading privilege of her background.
Beneath a veneer of indolence, Stadmutter seethes. Bolling is covertly working with Braeem Shaka, an advocate for reparations, to foment racial tension that imperils the country’s fragile progress. As Shaka becomes a wanted man, Emil and Tamsin grow entangled in his future and that of a country they are both eager to escape.
The Nga’phandileh Whisperer: A Sauútiverse Novella by Eugen Bacon
Publisher: Stars and Sabers Publishing
Date: September 2, 2025
Genre: Fiction
Language: English
Where to find it: Stars and Sabers Publishing
Eugen Bacon
Eugen Bacon is an African Australian author. She’s a Nebula, British Fantasy, and Foreword Indies Award winner, a twice World Fantasy Award finalist, and a finalist in the Shirley Jackson, Philip K. Dick Award, and the Nommo Awards for speculative fiction by Africans. Eugen is an Otherwise Fellow, and was also announced in the honor list 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’.
The Nga’phandileh Whisperer
When Chant’L, a young and precocious Guardian in New Inku’lulu-an elite space outpost of planet Zezépfeni-misuses her sound magic, the Guardians punish her by stripping away her magical ability, and exiling her to Savage Mound, a sound island on another planet, Wiimb-ó. The Guardians have a vital role to secure a secret border-the Hogiiri Hile Halah, a proactive invisible wall-protecting the federation of planets from the Nga’phandileh, creatures of unreality. But imprisoned Chant’L discovers that sound magic is inborn-never truly lost or taken. She channels energy from two spirit moons and, in an act of revenge, summons a creature of unreality to wreak havoc on the planets. Only her magic is flawed and she gets more than she bargained for when a trinity of Nga’phandileh slips from unreality, and is more uncontained than anyone could have imagined.Now the Guardians in Sector Z find themselves with a bigger problem they must not only keep secret, but resolve. A glossary of Bantu, Afrocentric and made-up words complements this genre-bending, cross-cultural novella. Something beautiful, something dark in lyrical language packed with affection, dread, anguish and hope.
Coração Sem Medo by Itamar Vieira Junior
Publisher: Todavia
Date: October 13, 2025
Genre: Fiction
Language: Portuguese
Where to find it: Todavia
Itamar Vieira Junior
Winner of awards in Brazil and abroad, such as the LeYa, Oceanos, and Montluc awards, as well as a two-time Jabuti winner, Itamar Vieira Junior was the first Brazilian to reach the final of the International Booker Prize. Born in Salvador, Bahia, in 1979, the writer holds a PhD in ethnic and African studies from the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA) and is the author of the short story collection “Doramar ou a Odisseia” (Doramar or the Odyssey of Chupim) and the novels “Save the Fire” and “Crooked Plow.” The latter became one of the greatest critical and popular successes in Brazilian literature in recent decades. The book has been translated into more than thirty languages and has inspired stage adaptations and a musical.
Coração sem medo
The book that concludes the “Earth Trilogy” started by TORTO ARADO.
Salvador, Bahia. Rita Preta, a supermarket cashier and mother of three, sees her life transformed when one of them—a teenager—disappears without a trace from the community where she lives in the Bahian capital. On her journey to find answers, she faces the possibility of losing her job, her romantic relationship with a truck driver, and even her own life, threatened by the atmosphere of violence and arbitrary action surrounding the disappearance.
When her present is interrupted by an unexpected event, Rita finds herself immersed in memories of her past: her early departure from her family home in the countryside to work as a maid in the city; her difficult relationship with her grandmother Carmelita, Donana’s missing daughter; and the guilt she carries over a tragic accident involving her brothers.
Once again plagued by a permanent feeling of exile as she revisits each memory, she discovers echoes of her existence in the stories of her ancestors as she journeys to the land where she spent her early years. While on the one hand, she tries to piece together the fragments of her history to remain whole in the present, on the other, she involuntarily searches for the key to a new beginning.
In the third and final installment of the ” Land Trilogy, ” which began with “Crooked Plow” and continued with “Save the Fire,” we follow Rita Preta, a descendant of Donana Chapéu Grande’s lineage, part of the generation forced to leave their lands due to escalating land conflicts to live on the outskirts of the city. These people have their land rights denied and continue to be threatened by institutions that violate their most intimate territory, their bodies, living the timeless legacy of violence that has plagued the country for centuries.
But Coração sem medo is also a narrative about the power of imagination against oblivion: Itamar Vieira Junior ‘s new novel is a literary testament to the power of stories that need to be told, revealing the unbreakable vigor of the human spirit.
Heart Without Fear is, above all, a story about the Brazilian people.
Victor Ehikhamenor: Chronicles of the Enchanted World by Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie
Publisher: Prestel
Date: August 12, 2025
Genre: Nonfiction
Language: English
Where to find it: Penguin Random House
Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie
Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie, Professor of Art History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts Research and the author of Ben Enwonwu: The Making of an African Modernist and Making History: African Collectors and the Canon of African Art Collection. He is editor and co-author of Artists of Nigeria and founder/editor of Critical Interventions: Journal of African Art History and Visual Culture. He consults on African and African Diaspora arts for major museums in the US, Europe, Asia, and Latin America.
Chronicles of the Enchanted World: Victor Ehikhamenor
This visually striking book is the first to explore the oeuvre of the celebrated multidisciplinary Nigerian artist, and its themes of identity, globalization, migration, cultural heritage, and African postcolonial identities. From his birth in a rural village in Nigeria to his unorthodox ascent as a global art star Victor Ehikhamenor is garnering worldwide attention for his vibrant and incisive works that engage contemporary art, African history, and the postcolonial politics of global Black identity. Drawing inspiration from his Nigerian roots, Ehikhamenor fuses tradition with contemporary expression through intricate patterns, symbolic motifs, and a rich visual language that weaves together the threads of mythology and cultural heritage. Brimming with boldly colored photographs and reproductions, this book focuses on Ehikhamenor’s most recent work such as Daydream Esoterica, Saints and Sanctums, Still Standing, and A Biography of the Forgotten, investigating them through a transcultural analysis of mobility, circulation, networks, and connectivity. It explores seven key aspects of the artist’s practice-rosaries, perforations, installations, paintings, drawings, collage, and sculpture-to show how he creates complex portraits of African peoples and African spaces.
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