Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor weaves two plotlines that are related, though owing to a twist at the end (no spoilers here), are related in a surprising way. The heart of the book is the power of stories to change the world, one person at a time.

The first narrative follows Zelu, a Nigerian-American in Chicago, the middle child in a large, close, and contentious family. Zelu unlike her parents and siblings, who are lawyers, doctors, and engineers, is a writer. Zelu’s third-person narrative is interspersed with interviews of her family and friends, which fill in more of her story. When the book opens Zelu is a failed writer, fired from her adjunct professor job and unable to sell a literary fiction manuscript that even she doesn’t like. In despair, she moves back home and throws herself into writing a science fiction manuscript titled Rusted Robots. To her surprise, she gets a seven-figure book deal and sells the movie rights to the book, which becomes an international hit. But fame isn’t all it’s positive for Zelu, who struggles internally to overcome the guilt from a childhood accident that left her partially paralyzed as well as battling her family who think they know what’s best for her.

The second narrative is Rusted Robots, told in first-person from the point of view of Ankara, a humanoid robot living on a post-human earth populated by the robots and AI that humans left behind. Ankara collects the stories that humans have left behind as she navigates the tribes of automation and the war between an AI hive-mind and the humanoid robots.

Okorafor builds two worlds: Zelu’s life in Chicago and vivid travels in Nigeria; the post-human world of the robots, a world in which the impact of humans is still very much present, but fading as the world changes. The world-building in this book is sharp, detailed, and inventive. Zelu’s world has a very large cast of characters. The narrative takes its time to introduce them in vignettes and the interviews, rendering them sharp and distinct. The interviews were useful in filling in Zelu’s world, although I sometimes found them to be intrusive and not well integrated.

Zelu is a tragic heroine, who can’t let go of the accident that rendered her a paraplegic, which left her with feelings of worthlessness. She rises from defeat and depression to remake herself again and again. Ankara, the humanoid robot, is no less complex as she grapples with moral questions of loyalty and friendship, all while the destruction of the planet looms.

These two narratives are braided, marked by striving and struggle for both Zelu and Ankara. The ending provides a delightful surprise that reinforces the theme of storytelling. I thought I knew where the plot was going and then it took a sudden turn at the end. Looking back, I could see how Okorafor skillfully planted the seeds for the connection between the two plotlines. Not all is resolved in the end, but, as a reader, I was left with complex characters and worlds that will live on.

I listened to the audiobook version, which used four different narrators to tell different parts of the story. This was effective, considering the two distinct plotlines as well as interviews that formed part of the narrative.