Captive: New Short Fiction from Africa

<p><strong><em>Brittle Paper</em>''s "Anticipated African Books of 2024"</strong></p> <p><strong>From Short Story Day Africa, eleven writers from Africa and the African diaspora explore the identities that connect us, the obsessions that bewitch us, and the self-delusions that drive us apart.</strong></p> <p>Passion and apathy, creation and destruction, honesty and deception—the blurred lines between these powerful forces are fundamental to the human condition. In three parts, the writers of <em>Captive</em> investigate these liminal spaces and rail against the boxes in which others seek to confine them, as writers, as Africans, and as humans.</p> <p>Journey from the fantastical Heaven’s Mouth where time stands still, to a London bus where a neurodiverse woman steals love to the songs of Tom Jones . . . flip the page to Ghana to examine a fertility fetish, or a post-apocalyptic Lesotho where sentient AI uses our emotions against us . . . visit the deceptively beautiful islands off the Tanzanian coast, where the ocean is always hungry, and women pay the price. <em>Captive</em> is a riot of imagination, a collision of worlds, and a testament to the shape-shifting nature of the soul.</p>