Washington Black is an eleven-year-old field slave who knows no other life than the Barbados sugar plantation where he was born. When his master's eccentric brother chooses him to be his manservant, Wash is terrified of the cruelties he is certain await him. But Christopher Wilde, or "Titch," is a naturalist, explorer, scientist, inventor, and abolitionist. He initiates Wash into a world where a flying machine can carry a man across the sky; where...

In the 1680s the slave trade was still in its infancy. In the Americas, virulent religious and class divisions, prejudice and oppression were rife, providing the fertile soil in which slavery and race hatred were planted and took root. Jacob is an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, with a small holding in the harsh north. Despite his distaste for dealing in "flesh," he takes a small slave girl in part payment for a bad debt from a plantation owner...

Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned across the years to save him. After this first summons, Dana is drawn back, again and again, to the plantation to protect Rufus and ensure that he will grow to manhood and father...

"The first publication of a previously unknown work of fantasy by J.R.R. Tolkien. Kullervo, son of Kalervo, is perhaps the darkest and most tragic of all J.R.R. Tolkien's characters. "Hapless Kullervo," as Tolkien called him, is a luckless orphan boy with supernatural powers and a tragic destiny. Brought up in the homestead of the dark magician Untamo, who killed his father, kidnapped his mother, and tried three times to kill him when he was still...

"Aster has little to offer folks in the way of rebuttal when they call her ogre and freak. She's used to the names; she only wishes there was more truth to them. If she were truly a monster, she'd be powerful enough to tear down the walls around her until nothing remains of her world. Aster lives in the lowdeck slums of the HSS Matilda, a space vessel organized much like the antebellum South. For generations, Matilda has ferried the last of humanity...

"A life in slavery taught Tisaanah how to survive with nothing but a sharp eye, a quick mind, and a touch of magic. But the night she tried to buy her freedom, she nearly paid with her life. Instead, she murdered the most powerful man in Threll. Forced to flee, she has only one chance at saving those she left behind: pledging herself to the Orders, an organization of magic Wielders strong enough to destroy her former masters. To earn her place, Tisaanah...

Ranging from the 17th century to our current moment, and crossing multiple continents, Counternarratives' stories and novellas draw upon memoirs, newspaper accounts, detective stories, interrogation transcripts, and speculative fiction to create new and strange perspectives on our past and present.

"Two half sisters, Effia and Esi, unknown to each other, are born into two different tribal villages in 18th century Ghana. Effia will be married off to an English colonial, and will live in comfort in the sprawling, palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle, raising half-caste children who will be sent abroad to be educated in England before returning to the Gold Coast to serve as administrators of the Empire. Her sister, Esi, will be imprisoned beneath...

"France, 13th century. Near the shores of the Mediterranean lives Vara Svobodová with her father, a prominent merchant, his barbarian wife, and her scientist father. Though the shadowy gazes of Great Gods and the greedy hands of local lord Petru Dominus hang over them, Vara lives a comfortable life. That all changes when she learns that she is da resu, destined to life after death and servitude of her unearthly powers to he who slays her. Rumours...

"When ten-year-old Ebby Freeman heard the gunshot, time stopped. And when she saw her brother, Baz, lying on the floor surrounded by the shattered pieces of a centuries-old jar, life as Ebby knew it shattered as well. The crime was never solved--and because the Freemans were one of the only Black families in a particularly well-to-do enclave of New England--the case has had an enduring, voyeuristic pull for the public. The last thing the Freemans...