Wayétu Moore

Wayétu Moore’s entire life has been sustained by fictions, said in The New York Times. The 33-yearold novelist immigrated to America at 5 when her native Liberia descended into civil war, and she remembers the tales her father told his three children to shield them. He’d say the sound of gunfire was dragons fighting, and that the bodies lying on the road were people napping. “My understanding was that we were in this game,” Moore says. “There was something wrong—there were some angry people walking around—but we were mostly OK.” And Moore was already steeped in the fables told by her mother’s people, the Vai. It was a rare Vai story, she says, that didn’t include a character disappearing or shape-shifting.

With her debut novel, She Would Be King, Moore is bringing that tradition to a new audience, said

in Powells.com. Set in the mid-19th century, it follows three supernaturally gifted Liberians: an immortal woman, an escaped slave from Virginia with bulletproof skin, and a biracial Jamaican who can turn invisible. But the story, for all its reality bending, also rebuts a particularly poisonous fiction: that the former American slaves who founded Liberia visited as much cruelty on the Vai as their masters had visited on them. “It’s a very cynical assumption,” says Moore, whose ancestors include South Carolina freedmen who immigrated to Liberia. She considers the reality more interesting, and inseparable from the nation Liberia has become. “It is a serious, joyous place,” she says. “The way they go about every day is inspiring. That’s something I knew was necessary and essential to the novel.”