Tiwa is a blacksmith in the Abule-Deep — the district suspended in the shadow of New Oyo, a floating megacity powered by divine Asu1eb9 and built on the labour of people it refuses to acknowledge. She has spent her life making prosthetic limbs from salvaged metal, repairing what falls from above, and never asking for anything in return. She is very good at not wanting things.
Prince Dayo is the Vessel of Shango — the living conduit of the thunder god’s power, unable to touch another person without risking their life, surrounded by people who love him in theory and fear him in practice. When his royal sky-chariot crashes into the lagoon at the edge of the Below, it is Tiwa who catches him. It is the only time in his life someone has done so without flinching.
While Dayo recovers in her hidden forge, they begin to discover what his lightning and her iron can do together: something the Orishas have not seen in a thousand years. Something that might be able to heal the city’s failing heart — the divine battery that has secretly been draining the life-force of the Below for centuries, fuelling the sky-palaces above on the suffering of the people below.
The city is dying. The truth is buried in its walls. And the only way to rebuild New Oyo is to bring the sky down to earth — permanently.
The Bronze Asẹ̀ is an Afro-Futurist Yoruba romance of class, power, and the alchemy of two people whose gifts were always meant to find each other — a novel about what is built when someone finally teaches the fire how to be gentle.
For readers of: Nnedi Okofor · Rivers Solomon · Becky Chambers · Marlon James
