Meerkat Press has revealed the cover for Crimson in Quietus by multi-award-winning Tanzanian-born author Eugen Bacon, designed by publisher Tricia Reeks. The novel, set for release in September 2026, marks a significant milestone as the inaugural Sauúti Novel set in the Afrocentric Sauútiverse, a five-planet system orbiting a binary star.
The story follows Muso’mi, a maadiregi gifted from childhood in the art of consuming sound, what her mother calls stealing sound. As a recent graduate from the Mahadum of the Mother’s Whisper and now a research fellow, she pursues higher studies on the language of silence to better understand her extraordinary abilities. When her friend discovers a secret and vanishes before revealing it, Muso’mi journeys across the pools of quietude between planets, following both her research and the trail of the missing woman. Her investigation draws her into grave danger as she uncovers a serial killer’s pattern of violence in hauntingly familiar territories of silence.
Publisher Tricia Reeks expressed her enthusiasm for the project, noting how Bacon’s work has consistently moved her since Claiming T-Mo through Mage of Fools and beyond, all of them Black speculative fiction. Reeks emphasized her immediate certainty about wanting to publish this novel, stating that Meerkat Press’s reputation for quality and the industry recognition of their authors validates her editorial instincts. The novel represents not just a publishing milestone but a creative leap into new narrative territory.
Eugen Bacon is an African Australian author whose accolades include wins for the Solstice, British Fantasy, Ignyte, Locus, and Foreword Indies Awards. She has been a finalist twice for the World Fantasy and Shirley Jackson Awards, as well as for the Philip K. Dick Awards and the Nommo Awards for speculative fiction by Africans. As an Otherwise Fellow, she was honored for doing exciting work in gender and speculative fiction, with Danged Black Thing making the Otherwise Award Honor List as a sharp collection of Afro-Surrealist work. Critics have compared her writing to N.K. Jemisin and Octavia E. Butler, with NPR praising how she nests the human in the fantastic with galaxy-spanning scope, while the Otherwise Motherboard Fellowship Committee noted how her fiction playfully defamiliarizes our understanding of humanity, gender, and the everyday.
Crimson in Quietus will be published by Meerkat Press in September 2026, supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund, Australia, as part of the University of Tasmania’s Hedberg Fellowship. More information about Eugen Bacon’s books is available at Meerkat Press and her website eugenbacon.com.
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