I’ve never read anything quite like this before, but the odd pieces formed a strangely natural and powerful whole. Aided by a lizard, poverty-stricken Tookie tries to protect his city from encroaching doom and evade the unseen malevolent creatures that stir in the New Orleans floodwaters.

This mythical tale of one man’s survival in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is the stuff of progressive legend. I found something vital in all of the stories, but here are the ones that particularly sang to me: Sinners, Saints, Dragons, and Haints, in the City Beneath the Still Waters And in the Hugo award-nominated short story “The City Born Great,” a young street kid fights to give birth to an old metropolis’s soul. A black mother in the Jim Crow south must figure out how to save her daughter from a fey offering impossible promises. In a parallel universe, a utopian society watches our world, trying to learn from our mistakes. Dragons and hateful spirits haunt the flooded city of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In these stories, Jemisin sharply examines modern society, infusing magic into the mundane, and drawing deft parallels in the fantasy realms of her imagination. Some stories are upbeat, some are terrifying, but each one slants from the expected. It includes a staggering range of material from harder SF in The Evaluators to the twists on more ‘traditional’ folkloric themes in Red Dirt Witch. The collection is the result of fifteen years’ worth of writing. What I found was far more fascinating and rawer than I’d imagined. Jemisin doesn’t retell, she invents so I jumped into this speculative short story collection with eyes wide open.

When I read her Broken Earth trilogy in 2017, it immediately leapt into my top 10 favourite book series – for its story, characters and trope turning. Jemisin, has been one of my most-awaited books of 2019. How Long ’til Black Future Month? written by three times Hugo Award winner N.K.

How long til black future month review