
Bones and Runes
Description
Three friends have their loyalty, beliefs and ancestral magic pushed to the limit.
Mlilo, a young isangoma, is forced to call on his friend Dan, a Druid apprentice, to help him retrieve his sacred amathambo (bones) from the clutches of evil. Taking us on an unprecedented journey through the magical realms of his ancestry and traditional beliefs, Mlilo's emerging skills are tested in life or death encounters with beings from the realm of Abaphansi. Amira, a close friend of Dan's, has her own independent path to forge but will soon find that her personal quests are inextricably linked to the two men.
The solitary isangoma, self-reliant to the extreme, will learn the importance of friendships, alliances and the meaning of living life in the real.
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Person
He is a charter member of the African Speculative Fiction Society and its Nommo Awards initiative. His then unpublished fantasy novel, Bones & Runes, was a finalist in the 2021 James Currey Prize for African Literature, and first published in the UK in 2022. He is one of the ten African writers making up the Sauúti Collective—the Afro-centric fantasy and speculative fiction shared-world. Stephen's academic essay, "Cosmologies and Languages Building Africanfuturism", appears in the 2024 Bloomsbury essay collection Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction.