Sky Full of Elephants

Campbell's debut novel opens a year after an unexplained event in which all the white people in America walked into the nearest body of water. Charlie Brunton, a Black man who served time for a wrongful conviction and now teaches electric and solar power systems at Howard University, receives a call from Sidney, the nineteen-year-old daughter he never knew he had. Sidney, whose white mother and stepfamily died in the event and who was raised to understand herself as white, has spent the year isolated in Wisconsin and asks the father she resents for help reaching Alabama. Their journey south, toward what is now called the Kingdom of Alabama, becomes a reckoning with family, collective trauma, and Black self-definition in a world no longer organized by whiteness. The novel combines speculative premise, road narrative, humor, and allegory, and was longlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize and the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award.

Author: Cebo Campbell · Original publisher: Simon & Schuster (New York), 2024