Chibundu Onuzo

Chibundu Onuzo has a new novel coming, and that’s reason enough to be excited. Kukuwa Fraser at Flatiron has acquired North American rights to The Great Shaking, negotiated by Duvall Osteen at UTA, according to Publishers Weekly’s book deals roundup for the week of September 28, 2026.

The novel is set in a dystopian future where African countries have emerged at the top of a reshaped world order. At its center is a family in what was formerly England attempting to immigrate to Nigeria—a premise that turns familiar migration narratives on their head. No publication date is given in the deal announcement.

In an Instagram post, she excitedly shared the news:

Soon and very soon, I’ll tell you the testimony of how in my maternity leave year (a year I thought was going to be super quiet), I ended up doing the most exciting book deal of my career so far. There are some things you experience that you can only conclude, nah God do this one.

Onuzo has been publishing since her teens. She signed her first book deal at nineteen, and her debut novel, The Spider King’s Daughter, was published by Faber in 2012. The novel won a Betty Trask Award and was shortlisted for both the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Commonwealth Book Prize.

She followed it with Welcome to Lagos in 2017, which was shortlisted for the RSL Encore Award. In 2018, Onuzo was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature as part of its inaugural “40 Under 40” initiative.

Her third novel, Sankofa, published in 2021, brought her work to an even wider readership. The novel follows Anna, a mixed-race British woman who, after discovering clues about the West African father she never knew, sets out to find him. It became a Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick and a BBC Between the Covers Book Club pick, was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction Futures Prize, and was named a Best Book of the Year by Time and Amazon.

Onuzo has also ventured into children’s fiction. Her debut children’s novel, Mayowa and the Sea of Words, was published by Bloomsbury and is the first book in an adventure trilogy about a girl who discovers she can harness the emotions contained in books.

Her work extends beyond fiction, too. Onuzo co-wrote the screenplay for the short film Dọlápọ̀ Is Fine and composed its music. The film won the HBO Short Film Competition at the 2020 American Black Film Festival.

With The Great Shaking, Onuzo appears to be taking her fiction in a striking new direction. A future in which the global order has been overturned, and a family from England finds itself looking toward Nigeria for a new home, is a particularly intriguing premise from a writer whose work has long engaged questions of identity, migration, belonging, and the legacies of colonialism.

Watch this space for a publication date.