Who Fears Death »

Nnedi Okorafor was born in the United States to two Nigerian immigrant parents. She holds a Ph.D. in English and is a professor at Chicago State University. She has been the winner of and finalist for many awards.

An award-winning literary author presents her first foray into supernatural fantasy with a novel of post-apocalyptic Africa.

In a far future, post-nuclear-holocaust Africa, genocide plagues one region. The aggressors, the Nuru, have decided to follow the Great Book and exterminate the Okeke. But when the only surviving member of a slain Okeke village is brutally raped, she manages to escape, wandering farther into the desert. She gives birth to a baby girl with hair and skin the color of sand and instinctively knows that her daughter is different. She names her daughter Onyesonwu, which means "Who Fears Death?" in an ancient African tongue.

Reared under the tutelage of a mysterious and traditional shaman, Onyesonwu discovers her magical destiny-to end the genocide of her people. The journey to fulfill her destiny will force her to grapple with nature, tradition, history, true love, the spiritual mysteries of her culture-and eventually death itself.

The Barnes & Noble Review

Okorafor has succeeded in setting down on the page in the person of Onyesonwu a complete and fully-sinewed human being, utterly believable, deep and complex. No plaster saint, she experiences highs and lows of emotion and passion, makes mistakes, learns, recovers, perseveres, and ultimately triumphs at no small personal sacrifice. The prose is simple and homely, yet potent and dramatic -- as befits an innately bright heroine without much formal schooling -- and the reader is soon enmeshed in a kind of non-Western Ur-storytelling with a flavor both ancient and modern.

Likewise, Okorafor tackles her themes and topics with subtlety, maturity, and wisdom. Power imbalances (interpersonal and civic), prejudice, the split duty of an individual to oneself and the community, the joy and danger of artistic creation (Onyesonwu's magic is her art), the treacherous and ennobling nature of love -- all these matters are incarnated in the persons and plot without preachiness or didactic overkill.