This month we have a special edition of Fantastical Fictions—we’re celebrating the publication of Nisi Shawl’s alternate history/steampunk/historical fantasy novel Everfair. Join Nisi and host Christopher Brown for a reading and discussion.

Nisi Shawl’s Everfair is a book with gorgeous sweep, spanning years and continents, loves and hates, histories and fantasies. Set against the big canvas of King Leopold’s horrific rule in the Congo, her engaging, passionate characters struggle to make the right choices in a world that is almost ours, but not quite. Everfair is sometimes sad, often luminous, and always original. —Karen Joy Fowler

Everfair is an alternate history novel that explores the question of what might have come of Belgium’s disastrous colonization of the Congo if the native populations had learned about steam technology a bit earlier. Fabian Socialists from Great Britain join forces with African-American missionaries to purchase land from the Belgian Congo’s “owner,” King Leopold II. This land, Everfair, is set aside as a safe haven, an imaginary Utopia for native populations of the Congo as well as escaped slaves returning from America and other places where African natives were being mistreated. Shawl’s speculative masterpiece manages to turn one of the worst human rights disasters on record into an exciting exploration of the possibilities inherent in a turn of history.

Nisi Shawl is a writer of science fiction and fantasy short stories and a journalist. They are the co-author (with Cynthia Ward) of Writing the Other: Bridging Cultural Differences for Successful Fiction. Their short stories have appeared in Asimov’s SF Magazine, Strange Horizons, and numerous other magazines and anthologies. Their story collection Filter House co-won the James Tiptree, Jr. Award in 2009 and their stories have been shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Award, the Gaylactic Spectrum Award, and the Carl Brandon Society Parallax Award.

Fantastical Fictions is an odd-monthly event focusing on the literary fantastic across genres and cultures. Please email us to sign up for our Fantastical Fictions email list if you’d like to receive news about our upcoming fantastic literature events, as well as announcements about new works of fantastic literature in the store.