Wole Talabi has revealed the West African cover for his forthcoming novel, The Fist of Memory, announcing the design alongside release dates on both sides of the Atlantic. The book lands in the US, UK, and Australia on October 27, with the West African edition, published by Masobe Books, following in Nigeria and the wider region on November 16.

The novel is billed as a first contact thriller with a distinctly Nigerian center of gravity: a meditation on reality, memory, and connectedness, wrapped inside a first-contact plot built for momentum. It’s a natural extension of the territory Talabi has been mapping across his career — the Nigerian-born, Australia-based author and engineer has built a body of speculative fiction including the story collection Convergence Problems, that consistently folds African cosmology and setting into science fiction’s biggest ideas.

This is Talabi’s second novel, following Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon (DAW/Gollancz, 2023), which was named one of Washington Post’s top 10 best science fiction and fantasy books of 2023, won the Nommo Award for Best Novel in 2024 and the Ilube Award for Best Speculative Fiction Novel 2024, and was nominated for the Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy awards. He has edited five anthologies including Africanfuturism: An Anthology (Brittle Paper, 2020) and Mothersound: The Sauútiverse Anthology (Android Press, 2023). He is represented by Bieke Van Aggelen of the African Literary Agency and currently lives and works in Australia.

Read the synopsis below:

When a non-communicative alien spacecraft suddenly appears in the sky, global powers are thrown into turmoil.
But for Tope, a principled Nigerian assassin with a talent for lethality in the employ of the mysterious witchdoctor known as “Baba,” it’s all just business as usual. At least until a job goes wrong, and Tope is caught in the scramble—a high-stakes game of power and politics for the future that is to come. Joined by Itumeleng, a South African astronomer plagued by mysterious dreams, they must find a way to survive, navigate their complicated pasts, and come to understand how they, and all of humanity, are connected to the alien craft before it lands and the world changes forever. But it won’t be easy. There are sinister forces marshalled against them, including a strange assassin obsessed with a single memory.

The Fist Of Memory is a first contact thriller unlike any other; a meditation on the nature of reality, memory and connectedness.

Preorder here.