In the mythical African Kingdom of Uju, tragedy strikes down a renown herbalist Janu with a sleeping sickness. Janu’s husband Chief Len—a Hand of the god, Gbew—and his son Fren must undertake a journey to the god's ibudo to find a cure. But there will be a price to be paid for this cure, and Fren will be the one to pay it. What ensues is a tale of magic, hardship, achillean romance, redemption, and finding one’s true self. Direct from the incredibly inventive mind of Dare Segun Falowo, author of Caged Ocean Dub, this new story takes you into the fantastically imagined, layered, and nuanced, world of Uju.

Dare Segun Falowo is a writer in the Nigerian Weird. Their work draws on cinema, indigenous cosmologies, pulp fiction & a lived surreality. Their words have appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Dark, Baffling, Omenana, and more. In 2018, they were longlisted for the Miles Morland Scholarship for African Writing. They have contributed to the essential anthologies of black speculative fiction: Dominion and Africa Risen. Their slipstream epic, ‘Convergence in Chorus Architecture’, was shortlisted for the Subjective Chaos Kind Of Awards and longlisted for the BSFA for Short Fiction. It was also translated into Italian by Zona42 (Convergenza nell’architettura del coro/Convergence in the Architecture of God), and Bengali by Joydhak Prakashan (Aagami Ratrir Upakhyant/Tales From The Other Night: Contemporary African Speculative Fiction). Their work appears in The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories, Vol. 2, and also in Horror Library 7 and the Were Tales Anthology, where they wrote as Baba Jide Low. Their debut collection of stories, Caged Ocean Dub released in 2023, and is published in the US, the UK, and Nigeria. They currently live in Lagos, Nigeria.

The ZamaShort imprint series is solely focused on the amazing powerhouse that is the short story. We give each short story its own publication so that it may be read and enjoyed fully as a stand-alone publication. As per the StoryTime Publishing mandate initialised in 2007, ZamaShort continues to champion and add to the ever-growing canon of African literature excellence and diversity.