-- This title will ship on or after June 10, 2025 --

Community ideals and magic clash in this follow-up to Grievers and Maroons by adrienne maree brown.

Ancestors is the powerful conclusion to adrienne maree brown's Grievers trilogy—a story of how life blooms amid tragedy and hate. In the wake of a mysterious pandemic known as Syndrome H-8, the survivors of a ravaged and isolated Detroit are building a future inside the network of deserted skyscrapers that define the city’s skyline. Dune’s magic keeps a lush green wall encircling the community, and while some settle inside its safety, others grow desperate to get out, fueling the tension between shelter and confinement. As Dune’s power blossoms and her connection to the spirits of the departed deepens, she must learn how to balance the needs of her people, both living and dead.

BIO

adrienne maree brown, the Co-Editor of Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements, is a social justice facilitator, healer, doula and pleasure activist living in Detroit. She is a student of emergence, somatics, transformation and science fiction. She is part of the training body of generative somatics, and coodinating the Just Films Narrative Shift Program for Allied Media Projects. She is the 2015-2016 Ursula le Guin Fellowship, the Knight Arts Challenge for 2013 and 2015, a Kresge Literary Arts Fellow for 2013, in the inaugural Speculative Fiction Workshop at Voices of Our Nation 2014, and a graduate of the Clarion Sci-Fi and Fantasy Workshop in 2015.

REVIEWS

"Ancestors is a moving, kaleidoscopic portrait of resistance and survival ... adrienne maree brown has written something profound, a novel exploring those things we hold dear, what we preserve, and perhaps most importantly, what we must fight to defend." -- Daniel Alarcón, author of At Night We Walk in Circles

"A timely narrative ... This post-industrial, post-pandemic, post-apocalyptic novel examines the collective struggle for harmony in the face of personal and collective trauma. ... Ancestors delivers tender conjecture full of somatic healing, spiritual fortitude, and human re-connection. This is the book we need." -- Nandi Comer, Michigan Poet Laureate and author of Tapping Out 

“In a place ‘thick with souls,’ brown tells an un-mythological story of gentrification, a deadly virus, and the undoing of systems. … Rich with beautiful Black-love-story-telling … AMB's voice speaks in lush poems that give us optimism for a tangible revolutionary Detroit future. -- jessica Care moore, Detroit Poet Laureate and author of We Want Our Bodies Back

[P]  AK Press  /  June 10, 2025

1.0" H x 6.9" L x 5.0" W (0.62 lbs) 256 pages