DAW has acquired Nommo and Sidewise Award-winning author Wole Talabi’s THE FIST OF MEMORY, a first contact thriller unlike any other and a meditation on the nature of reality, memory and connectedness.

In this thriller, a strange and non-communicative alien spacecraft suddenly appears in the sky, global powers are thrown into turmoil. But for Tope, a principled Nigerian assassin with a talent for lethality in the employ of the mysterious witch doctor known as ‘Baba’, it’s all just business as usual. At least until a job goes wrong, and Tope is caught in the scramble – a high stakes game of power and politics for the future that is to come.

Joined by Itumeleng, a South African astrophysicist plagued by mysterious dreams, they must find a way to survive, navigate their complicated pasts, and come to understand how they, and all of humanity, are connected to the alien craft before it lands and the world changes forever. But it won’t be easy. There are sinister forces marshalled against them, including a strange and motivated assassin obsessed with a single memory.

About the Author: WOLE TALABI is an engineer, writer, and editor from Nigeria. He is the author of the novel Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon (DAW books/Gollancz, 2023). His short fiction has appeared in places like Asimov’s Science Fiction, Lightspeed Magazine, Tor.com and is collected in the books Convergence Problems (DAW books, 2024) and Incomplete Solutions(Luna Press, 2019). He has been a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards.

Coming Fall 2026.

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