A strange sickness is sweeping through Detroit, leaving unbearable grief and overwhelmed city hospitals and morgues in its wake. That’s the eerily familiar world into which writer adrienne maree brown’s debut novella drops us.
“That initial spark of the idea was like, every time I lose someone, I'm struck by how quickly I'm expected to be functional again," said brown. "And it piles up in me—this need to take time and go grieve, but not having that time.”
Grievers is the first story in a trilogy published by Black Dawn, a speculative fiction imprint from AK Press.
The seed of the story took root a long time before any of us had ever heard of COVID-19, and yet the book is a work of speculative fiction that feels anything but. It’s an auspicious and affecting story, for everyone who’s lost something, but especially for Black Detroiters.
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