This novel, written in lush, irresistible, and poetic prose, took me into the lives of people in another time and place into their loves, nightmares, dreams, their unexpected ties and into the hearts of women I could otherwise never know. I was transported Amy Bloom, New York Times bestselling author of White Houses
With comparisons to Beloved and Homegoing, this debut is an era-spanning tale that originates in the American Civil War and beyond Stylist
If you are grieving for Toni Morrison, Afia Atakora is the young writer to read now: the kind of historical novelist who makes you believe she must have somehow seen the places she describes and known these characters herself. Her astonishing debut takes the reader to a Reconstruction-era Southern plantation, where two little girlsthe enslaved child of the local healer and the planters cloistered daughterbecome unlikely friends. Conjure Women illuminates an unfamiliar corner of Civil War history and brings to life an indelible character whose talents, from midwifery to voodoo, will yield her own unconventional path to power and freedom Nell Freudenberger, author of Lost and Wanted
In Conjure Women Afia Atakora masterfully centers two generations of women, folk healers who carry the secrets of their community while bearing the brunt of its antebellum past and its reconstructed present. Telling a gripping story at once grand and intimate, Atakora renders humanity in all its beautiful fits and flaws. Page after page, her voice announces itself like a thunderclap. The women in this novel will blessedly stick with you long after the last word has been read Caleb Johnson, author of Treeborne
