Death of the Author

Zelunjo 'Zelu' Onyenezi-Onyedele is a Nigerian-American writer who became paraplegic at twelve. At her sister's wedding she learns she's been fired from her adjunct teaching job, and, humiliated and adrift, she retreats to her parents' house and writes the book she's always been too afraid to write: Rusted Robots, a far-future epic set in a post-human Nigeria where androids and AIs war amid the ruins, and a robot named Ankara reveres the lost human gift of storytelling.

Rusted Robots makes Zelu an overnight sensation—a three-book deal, a film option, sudden fame—and reshapes her relationships with her sprawling family, her body, and herself, as the boundary between the author and her creation grows thin. Nnedi Okorafor's Death of the Author is an Africanfuturist novel-within-a-novel about authorship, disability, diaspora, and the power of story to remake a life.