The Fruit of the Tree · Book 1
Bleeding Roots
Feb 2025
Are the stories told by our ancestors merely tales if the only god that seems to have power is the West? What use is divine enlightenment in the face of colonial influence? Can you keep the traditions that raised you, or must you become what you hate in order to overcome it? Keresi never asked these questions until Kuzuba erupted, and what he had lived by implicitly was questioned explicitly.
Kuzuba is a small East African republic a colonial map once drew and the French then walked away from. Its two peoples, the Obi and the Kwera, have been told for a century that they are enemies. In the year this story opens, the country begins to agree.
Bleeding Roots is Keresi's first-person account of that year. Fourth of eight children born to the line of Mashira, the old sorcerer who once united Kuzuba, he comes of age as the Kuzuba Armed Forces fractures from within and the radios begin naming the dead before they are dead. Six of his siblings carry blessings from the old gods: gifts none of them asked for, none of which will save them. What follows is the story of a mother raising eight alone, a brother who becomes something no one had a word for, and a sister left to carry what is left.
Book One of The Fruit of the Tree, it is at once a mythic family tragedy and a grounded account of a civil war.
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