Eugen Bacon's work is deemed cheeky with a fierce intelligence in text that's resplendent, delicious, dark and evocative. NPR called her novel Claiming T-Mo 'a confounding mysterious tour de force'. The Road to Woop Woop and Other Stories imbues the same lushness in a writerly language that is Bacon's own. This peculiar hybrid of the untraditional, the extraordinary within, without and along the borders of normalcy will hypnotise and absorb the reader with tales that refuse to be labelled....

A Place Between Waking and Forgetting is dark speculative fiction, an Afro-Irreal collection in which transformative stories of culture, diversity, climate change, unlimited futures, collisions of worlds, mythology, and more, inhabit. It cases black people stories in bold and evocative text, at times deeply flawed but potentially redeemable protagonists in rich hues of blackness and light. Something beautiful, something dark in lyrical language packed with affection, dread, anguis...

In the dystopian world of Mafinga, Jasmin must contend with a dictator's sorcerer to cleanse the socialist state of its deadly pollution. Mafinga's malevolent king dislikes books and, together with his sorcerer Atari, has collapsed the environment to almost uninhabitable. The sun has killed all the able men, including Jasmin's husband Godi. But Jasmin has Godi's secret story machine that tells of a better world, far different from the wastelands of Mafinga. Jasmin's crime for possessing th...

In this engaging and accessible guide, Eugen Bacon explores writing speculative fiction as a creative practice, drawing from her own work, and the work of other writers and theorists, to interrogate its various subgenres. Through analysis of writers such as Stephen King, J.R.R. Tolkien and J. K. Rowling, this book scrutinises the characteristics of speculative fiction, considers the potential of writing cross genre and covers the challenges of targeting young adults. It connects critical a...

Danged Black Thing is an extraordinary collection of stories about love and migration, gender and class, patriarchy and womanhood, from a remarkable and original voice. Traversing the West and Africa, they celebrate the author's hybridity with breathtaking sensuousness and lyricism.Simbiyu wins a scholarship to study in Australia, but cannot leave behind a world of walking barefoot, the orange sun, and his longing for a "once pillow-soft mother." In his past, darkness rose from the...

ONE MAN. TWIN SOULS. AN UNQUENCHABLE BEAST.It is a muntu—a trapped spirit in the island of the dead. This creature of legend becomes a deadly reality when a killer strikes the heart of Sydney.The victims seem unconnected, yet Investigating Officer Ivory Tembo is convinced the killings are anything but random.The case soon leads Ivory into places she never imagined. In order to stop the killings and save the life of the man she loves, she mus...

A speculative short story of family, love, and creation.Mazu designs biorobots – living instruments built to measure the world's weather and never question it. But in the sterile rhythm of code and command, his own life feels increasingly mechanical: long shifts, video calls home to a mother who wants him married, and brief messages from Jordan, the man he can't quite bring himself to tell her about.When one of Mazu's creations, a biorobot named Jazz stationed in A...

In the one tumultuous day, Ch'anzu loses hir job and finds wife Scarlet in bed with a stranger. As life unexpectedly spirals out of control, Ch'anzu turns to hir charismatic Aunt Mae for comfort and wisdom, and makes the bold move to work on a project in Serengotti, a migrant African outpost in rural Australia.In a novel haunted by the strangeness and yearnings of a displaced community both beautiful and fractured Ch'anzu is forced to confront hir many demons. Back in the city, bro...

Discover the haunting origins of an immortal soul in Novic, a mesmerizing novelette by Eugen Bacon that serves as the "story-before-the-story" of the enigmatic Sayneth priest introduced in her acclaimed debut novel, Claiming T-Mo.In Claiming T-Mo, Novic emerges as a figure of profound mystery— an immortal with eyes as ancient as Jacob and a visage that whispers of death itself. Novic's defiance of a matriarchal society' s conventions sets in motion a Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation ...

2025 Foreword INDIES Gold Winner for Multicultural (Adult Fiction)2025 Foreword INDIES Finalist for Fantasy (Adult Fiction)Aurealis Awards Finalist for Best Horror NovellaShortlisted for British Fantasy Award for Best NovellaLonglisted for the BSFA AwardWhen a precocious Guardian in Sector Z in New Inku'lulu-an elite space outpost-misuses her sound m...

Shirley Jackson Awards, ShortlistBSFA Awards for Best Shorter Fiction, ShortlistNommo Awards for Speculative Fiction by Africans, ShortlistAfter falling out with her brothers, Samaki the goddess of water flees to Earth where she must mask her trace by splitting into a quadruplet of magi.A quadruplet is perfect, but all things are never equal. Dissonance arises when the magus Umozi breaks the quadruplet.Only the newness of a child magus can restore ba...

In this lush interplanetary tale, Novic is an immortal Sayneth priest who flouts the conventions of a matriarchal society by choosing a name for his child. This act initiates chaos that splits the boy in two, unleashing a Jekyll-and-Hyde child upon the universe. Named T-Mo by his mother and Odysseus by his father, the story spans the boy's lifetime — from his early years with his mother Silhouette on planet Grovea to his travels to Earth where he meets and marries Salem, and together they ...