She Would Be King

Loosely based on a short chapter in Liberian history, She Would Be King is a fictional retelling of the country's founding.

Coming from the West African village of Lai, a Virginia plantation and Jamaica, three characters meet at the settlement of Monrovia, and it is through their disparate yet connected stories that Wayetu Moore crafts an astonishing new vision of the founding years of Liberia.

In 1831, Gbessa is exiled from Lai for being cursed, forced to wander alone and starving with only the spirit of the wind to guide her. June Dey is born on the Emerson plantation with superhuman strength, which he conceals until a confrontation with an overseer forces him to flee. Norman Aragon, the son of a white British colonizer and a Maroon slave, finds he has inherited his mother's power to disappear at will.

When their paths cross amid the tensions between African American settlers and indigenous tribes in Liberia, their peculiar gifts become central to the founding conflicts of this emerging state. She Would Be King is a brilliantly imagined mixture of history and magical realism from an exciting new writer.

About the Author

Wayetu Moore is a graduate of Howard University and the University of Southern California, and she is currently a Margaret Mead Fellow at Columbia University Teachers College. She is the founder of One More Book, a non-profit organisation that encourages reading among children of countries with low literacy rates and underrepresented cultures. Her writing has been published by Guernica, the Rumpus and the Atlantic. She Would Be King is her first novel.