The Writer’s Center presents a FREE virtual chat about the craft of fiction! We’re joined by Morowa Yejidé to talk about her richly imagined novel, Creatures of Passage. Morowa will be in conversation with Zach Powers, novelist and Director of Communications at The Writer’s Center.
RSVP below, and you’ll receive an email on or before March 18 with instructions for joining the chat via our video conferencing platform, Zoom. FREE and open to the public, all times Eastern. Limited space.
We encourage you to order a copy of the book from your local, independent bookseller or online from Bookshop.org.
MOROWA YEJIDÉ, a native of Washington, DC, is the author of the critically acclaimed novel Time of the Locust, which was a 2012 finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize, long-listed for the 2015 PEN/Bingham Prize, and a 2015 NAACP Image Award nominee. She lives in the DC area with her husband and three sons. Creatures of Passage is her second novel.
About the Book
Nephthys Kinwell is a taxi driver of sorts in Washington, DC, ferrying ill-fated passengers in a haunted car: a 1967 Plymouth Belvedere with a ghost in the trunk. Endless rides and alcohol help her manage her grief over the death of her twin brother, Osiris, who was murdered and dumped in the Anacostia River. Unknown to Nephthys when the novel opens in 1977, her estranged great-nephew, ten-year-old Dash, is finding himself drawn to the banks of that very same river. It is there that Dash—reeling from having witnessed an act of molestation at his school, but still questioning what and who he saw—has charmed conversations with a mysterious figure he calls the “River Man,” who somehow appears each time he goes there. When Dash arrives unexpectedly at Nephthys’s door one day bearing a cryptic note about his unusual conversations with the River Man, Nephthys must face both the family she abandoned and what frightens her most when she looks in the mirror. Creatures of Passage beautifully threads together the stories of Nephthys, Dash, and others both living and dead. Morowa Yejidé’s deeply captivating novel shows us an unseen Washington filled with otherworldly landscapes, flawed super-humans, and reluctant ghosts, and brings together a community intent on saving one young boy in order to reclaim themselves.
“In this beautifully written and gloriously conceived novel, Morowa Yejidé reveals her mastery yet again. This novel is both contemporary and ancient, frightening and stirring, playful and wise, an unforgettable blurring of reality and genres from its haunted Plymouth automobile to the mysteries in the fog in this alternate America and hidden Washington, DC. With its lyricism and bold imagination, Creatures of Passage is unlike anything you’ve ever read.” —Tananarive Due, author of Ghost Summer
“Comparisons will be made to Toni Morrison and they will be well founded, but Morowa Yejidé is in a class of her own with Creatures of Passage, a mesmerizing tale about love, loss, revenge, death, and restoration that hovers close to the edge of fantasy yet is deeply grounded in history and in a reality easily recognizable in the contemporary world.” —Elizabeth Nunez, author of Even in Paradise