Literary Fiction — The Book Roads

She Would Be King

Wayétu Moore

In the nineteenth century, as Liberia emerges as a new nation, three extraordinary individuals from different parts of the African diaspora find their lives intertwined. Gbessa, a young woman from a West African village, is exiled after being accused of witchcraft. Left to die in the wilderness, she survives a deadly snakebite and discovers she possesses an unusual gift: immortality. June Dey, born into slavery on a plantation in Virginia, has extraordinary physical strength that he struggles to control. Norman Aragon, the son of a British coloniser and a Jamaican Maroon woman, can disappear from sight whenever the earth calls him. Their journeys eventually bring them to Monrovia, where former enslaved people from America are attempting to establish a new society alongside Liberia's indigenous communities. As tensions rise between settlers, local populations, and European powers, the three must decide how to use their extraordinary abilities to protect their new homeland. Blending magical realism, African folklore, and historical fiction, She Would Be King reimagines the founding of Liberia through stories of displacement, resistance, identity, and the complicated legacies of colonialism.

Liberia Jamaica United States 2018