Grievers

A tale of what happens when we can no longer ignore what has been lost in this world.

Grievers is the story of a city so plagued by grief that it can no longer function. Dune’s mother is patient zero of a mysterious illness that stops people in their tracks—in mid-sentence, mid-action, mid-life—casting them into a nonresponsive state from which no one recovers. Dune must navigate poverty and the loss of her mother as Detroit’s hospitals, morgues, and graveyards begin to overflow. As the quarantined city slowly empties of life, she investigates what caused the plague, and what might end it. In anguish, she follows in the footsteps of her late researcher father, who has a physical model of Detroit’s history and losses set up in their basement. She dusts the model off and begins tracking the sick and dying, discovering patterns, finding comrades in curiosity, conspiracies for the fertile ground of the city, and the unexpected magic that emerges when the debt of grief is cleared.

“Grievers is a beautiful debut novella by adrienne maree brown, who is already one of our most important voices in Afrofuturism and true-lifeworldbuilding. Grievers could not be more timely, tackling loss, plague, gentrification, memory and grief with a path toward hope in a future Detroit. Each paragraph is lovingly crafted, a story unto itself, blending into a tapestry no reader will soon forget.” —Tananarive Due, American Book Award winner, author of Ghost Summer: Stories

This first volume of brown’s Grievers tales also launches AK Press’s new speculative fiction series Black Dawn, in which authors create alternate realities through visionary works that imagine different ways of seeing, being in, and remaking the world.

adrienne maree brown is a writer living in Detroit. She is a student of the works of Octavia E. Butler and Ursula K. Le Guin. Grievers is her first novel. Her previous books include Octavia’s Brood, Emergent Strategy, Pleasure Activism, and We Will Not Cancel Us. Her visionary fiction has appeared in The Funambulist, Harvard Design Review, and Dark Mountain.

• Publisher: AK Press
• Pages: 150
• Released: September 7, 2021
• ISBN-13: 9781849354523