In this exhilarating tale by New York Times bestselling and award-winning author Nnedi Okorafor, a disabled Nigerian American woman pens a wildly successful Sci-Fi novel, but as her fame rises, she loses control of the narrative—a surprisingly cutting, yet heartfelt drama about art and love, identity and connection, and, ultimately, what makes us human. This is a story unlike anything you’ve read before.

The future of storytelling is here.

Disabled, disinclined to marry, and more interested in writing than a lucrative career in medicine or law, Zelu has always felt like the outcast of her large Nigerian family. Then her life is upended when, in the middle of her sister’s lavish Caribbean wedding, she’s unceremoniously fired from her university job and, to add insult to injury, her novel is rejected by yet another publisher. With her career and dreams crushed in one fell swoop, she decides to write something just for herself. What comes out is nothing like the quiet, literary novels that have so far peppered her unremarkable career. It’s a far-future epic where androids and AI wage war in the grown-over ruins of human civilization. She calls it Rusted Robots.

When Zelu finds the courage to share her strange novel, she does not realize she is about to embark on a life-altering journey—one that will catapult her into literary stardom, but also perhaps obliterate everything her book was meant to be. From Chicago to Lagos to the far reaches of space, Zelu’s novel will change the future not only for humanity, but for the robots who come next.

A book-within-a-book that blends the line between writing and being written, Death of the Author is a masterpiece of metafiction that manages to combine the razor-sharp commentary of Yellowface with the heartfelt humanity of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. Surprisingly funny, deeply poignant, and endlessly discussable, this is at once the tale of a woman on the margins risking everything to be heard and a testament to the power of storytelling to shape the world as we know it.


Don't just take our word for it...

“There’s more vivid imagination in a page of Nnedi Okorafor’s work than in whole volumes.”
– Ursula K. Le Guin

“An ambitious, inventive tribute to the power of storytelling itself.”
– Nikki Erlick, New York Times bestselling author of The Measure

“A deeply felt dazzle. A blaze. It is true deep to the bones.”
– Luis Alberto Urrea, Pulitzer Prize finalist and bestselling author of The House of Broken Angels


Taste the very first page

What’s the story you want?

Honestly, I don’t see it. Even after everything, Zelu will always just be Zelu to me. What you think she is—it’s all made up. Life is short. Fortune is fleeting. Fame is just swirling dust. It’s people dreaming and perceiving while they say your name like it’s some tangible object, but it’s not. A name is just a name. A sound.

What matters is family. Without family, you’re nothing. You’re debris tumbling through space. Unseen, unconnected, uncollected, unknown, no matter how famous you are.

Zelu will always be part of our family. She will always be my sister. No matter what. Oh, it’s been rough. The fact is that Zelu never really cared about family. Zelu had to do her own thing. Then she’d expect everyone else to deal with her mess. We will always love Zelu. We hang in there for her. She never made it easy, though.

My name is Chinyere. I’m the oldest. That’s a year older than Zelu…