Black Friday

Cheryl S. Ntumy's fantasy and near-future sci-fi is powerful and unique. Black Friday: Short Stories from Africa is a collection of short stories exploring diverse themes ranging from rampant consumerism, corruption and oppression to community-building, faith, reclamation and healing, all with a speculative bent.

Explore solarpunk set in Ghana, cyberpunk set in South Africa and dystopian fiction set in Botswana. Robots and aliens. Butterflies and elephants. Wedding dresses that make brides happy and electrified dresses that hold queens hostage. Consumer culture and permaculture.

These are dark, sometimes bleak stories of war, grief and disillusionment, but also optimistic, wholesome tales of love, regeneration and hope. With mysteries, magical realism and cautionary tales, the collection has something for everyone.
The Flame Tree Beyond and Within short story collections bring together tales of myth and imagination by modern and contemporary writers, carefully selected by anthologists, and sometimes featuring short stories from a single author. Overall, the series presents a wide range of diverse and inclusive voices with myth, folkloric-inflected short fiction, and an emphasis on the supernatural, science fiction, the mysterious and the speculative. The books themselves are gorgeous, with foiled covers, printed edges and published only in hardcover editions, offering a lifetime of reading pleasure.

Cheryl S. Ntumy is a Ghanaian writer of short fiction and novels of speculative fiction, young adult fiction and romance. Her work has appeared in FIYAH Literary Magazine; Apex Magazine; World Literature Today; Best of World SF Vol. 3 and Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction 2022, among others. Her work has also been nominated for the Nommo Award for African Speculative Fiction, the British Science Fiction Association Award, the Commonwealth Writers Short Story Prize and the Miles Morland Foundation Scholarship. She is part of the Sauútiverse Collective, which created a shared universe for Afrocentric speculative fiction, and a member of Petlo Literary Arts, an organisation that develops and promotes creative writing in Botswana.

Eugen Bacon (Foreword) is an African Australian author. She’s a British Fantasy and Foreword Indies Award winner, a twice World Fantasy Award finalist, and a finalist in the Shirley Jackson, Philip K. Dick, Victorian Premier’s Literary Award and the Nommo Awards for speculative fiction by Africans. Eugen was announced in the Honor List of the Otherwise Fellowships 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’. Visit her at eugenbacon.com.