Caribbean-Canadian author Nalo Hopkinson (Brown Girl in the Ring, The Salt Roads, Falling in Love with Hominids) returns with a long-awaited new collection of her deeply imaginative short fiction that offers striking journeys to far-flung futures and fantastical landscapes. Hopkinson is at the peak of her powers, moving effortlessly between art, folklore, science, and magic.
Caribbean-Canadian author Nalo Hopkinson (Brown Girl in the Ring, The Salt Roads, Falling in Love with Hominids) is an internationally renowned storyteller. This long-awaited new collection of her deeply imaginative short fiction offers striking journeys to far-flung futures and fantastical landscapes. Hopkinson is at the peak of her powers, moving effortlessly between art, folklore, science, and magic.
Hailed by the Los Angeles Times as having “an imagination that most of us would kill for,” Nalo Hopkinson and her Afro-Caribbean, Canadian, and American influences shine in truly unique stories that are gorgeously strange, inventively subversive, and vividly beautiful. In her first stories since 2015, a woman and her cyborg pig eke out a living in a future waterworld; two scientists contemplate the cavernous remains of an alien lifeform; and an artist creates nanotechnology that asserts Blackness where it is least welcome.
Praise for Nalo Hopkinson
“A major talent.” —Karen Joy Fowler, author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
“Nalo Hopkinson has had a remarkable impact on popular fiction. Her work continues to question the very genres she adopts, transforming them from within through her fierce intelligence and her commitment to a radical vision that refuses easy consumption.” —Globe and Mail
“One of the best fantasy authors working today.” —io9
“An exciting new voice in our literature.” —Edmonton Journal
“. . . like Samuel R. Delany and Octavia E. Butler, [Hopkinson] forces us to consider how inequities of race, gender, class and power might be played out in a dystopian future.” —The News Magazine of Black America
“Caribbean science fiction? Nalo Hopkinson is staking her claim as one of its most notable authors . . .” —Caribbean Travel and Life
“One of our most important writers.” —Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
“Hopkinson’s prose is a distinct pleasure to read: richly sensual, with high-voltage erotic content and gorgeous details.” —SCIFI.com
Nalo Hopkinson was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and also spent her childhood in Trinidad and Guyana before her family moved to Toronto, Canada, when she was sixteen.
Hopkinson’s novels include Brown Girl in the Ring, Midnight Robber, The Salt Roads, The New Moon’s Arms, The Chaos and most recently, Sister Mine. She has edited four anthologies, including Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction and the British Fantasy Award-winning People Of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction! anthology co-edited with Kristine Ong Muslim. She was the lead author of House of Whispers, a serialized comic in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman Universe.
In 1997, Hopkinson won the Warner Aspect First Novel Contest for Brown Girl in the Ring. Brown Girl in the Ring was also nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award, and received the John W. Campbell and Locus awards for Best First Novel. Her collection Skin Folk received the World Fantasy Award and the Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic. The Salt Roads received the Gaylactic Spectrum Award for positive exploration of queer issues in speculative fiction. The New Moon’s Arms won the Sunburst Award, making Hopkinson the first author to receive the award twice, and Canada’s Prix Aurora Award. In 2020, Hopkinson was named the 37th Damon Knight Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America, the youngest and the first woman of African descent to receive this lifetime honor.
Her fantasy novel Blackheart Man is forthcoming from Saga Press in August 2024. She is also collaborating as script writer with artists John Jennings (I Am Alfonso Jones) and Stephen Bissette (The Swamp Thing) on Night Comes Walking, a horror graphic novel forthcoming from Megascope, an imprint of Abrams ComicArts.
Hopkinson was one of the founders of the Carl Brandon Society, which exists to further the conversation on race and ethnicity in speculative fiction. As a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California Riverside, she was a member of a research cluster in science fiction, and of the University of California’s “Speculative Futures Collective.” She has been a Writer-in-Residence a number of times at both the Clarion Workshop in San Diego, California, and Clarion West in Seattle, Washington. She currently a professor in the School of Creative Writing of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.
Jamaica Ginger and Other Concoctions
Nalo Hopkinson
Caribbean-Canadian author Nalo Hopkinson (Brown Girl in the Ring, The Salt Roads, Falling in Love with Hominids) returns with a long-awaited new collection of her deeply imaginative short fiction that offers striking journeys to far-flung futures and fantastical landscapes. Hopkinson is at the peak of her powers, moving effortlessly between art, folklore, science, and magic.
Jamaica Ginger and Other Concoctions
by Nalo Hopkinson
ISBN: 978-1-61696-426-9 (print); 978-1-61696-427-6 (digital)
Published: October 29. 2024
Available Format(s): trade paperback, ebook
Caribbean-Canadian author Nalo Hopkinson (Brown Girl in the Ring, The Salt Roads, Falling in Love with Hominids) is an internationally renowned storyteller. This long-awaited new collection of her deeply imaginative short fiction offers striking journeys to far-flung futures and fantastical landscapes. Hopkinson is at the peak of her powers, moving effortlessly between art, folklore, science, and magic.
Hailed by the Los Angeles Times as having “an imagination that most of us would kill for,” Nalo Hopkinson and her Afro-Caribbean, Canadian, and American influences shine in truly unique stories that are gorgeously strange, inventively subversive, and vividly beautiful. In her first stories since 2015, a woman and her cyborg pig eke out a living in a future waterworld; two scientists contemplate the cavernous remains of an alien lifeform; and an artist creates nanotechnology that asserts Blackness where it is least welcome.
Praise for Nalo Hopkinson
“A major talent.”
—Karen Joy Fowler, author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
“Nalo Hopkinson has had a remarkable impact on popular fiction. Her work continues to question the very genres she adopts, transforming them from within through her fierce intelligence and her commitment to a radical vision that refuses easy consumption.”
—Globe and Mail
“One of the best fantasy authors working today.”
—io9
“An exciting new voice in our literature.”
—Edmonton Journal
“. . . like Samuel R. Delany and Octavia E. Butler, [Hopkinson] forces us to consider how inequities of race, gender, class and power might be played out in a dystopian future.”
—The News Magazine of Black America
“Caribbean science fiction? Nalo Hopkinson is staking her claim as one of its most notable authors . . .”
—Caribbean Travel and Life
“One of our most important writers.”
—Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
“Hopkinson’s prose is a distinct pleasure to read: richly sensual, with high-voltage erotic content and gorgeous details.”
—SCIFI.com
Nalo Hopkinson was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and also spent her childhood in Trinidad and Guyana before her family moved to Toronto, Canada, when she was sixteen.
Hopkinson’s novels include Brown Girl in the Ring, Midnight Robber, The Salt Roads, The New Moon’s Arms, The Chaos and most recently, Sister Mine. She has edited four anthologies, including Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction and the British Fantasy Award-winning People Of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction! anthology co-edited with Kristine Ong Muslim. She was the lead author of House of Whispers, a serialized comic in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman Universe.
In 1997, Hopkinson won the Warner Aspect First Novel Contest for Brown Girl in the Ring. Brown Girl in the Ring was also nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award, and received the John W. Campbell and Locus awards for Best First Novel. Her collection Skin Folk received the World Fantasy Award and the Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic. The Salt Roads received the Gaylactic Spectrum Award for positive exploration of queer issues in speculative fiction. The New Moon’s Arms won the Sunburst Award, making Hopkinson the first author to receive the award twice, and Canada’s Prix Aurora Award. In 2020, Hopkinson was named the 37th Damon Knight Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America, the youngest and the first woman of African descent to receive this lifetime honor.
Her fantasy novel Blackheart Man is forthcoming from Saga Press in August 2024. She is also collaborating as script writer with artists John Jennings (I Am Alfonso Jones) and Stephen Bissette (The Swamp Thing) on Night Comes Walking, a horror graphic novel forthcoming from Megascope, an imprint of Abrams ComicArts.
Hopkinson was one of the founders of the Carl Brandon Society, which exists to further the conversation on race and ethnicity in speculative fiction. As a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California Riverside, she was a member of a research cluster in science fiction, and of the University of California’s “Speculative Futures Collective.” She has been a Writer-in-Residence a number of times at both the Clarion Workshop in San Diego, California, and Clarion West in Seattle, Washington. She currently a professor in the School of Creative Writing of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.