Alade: Book 1 of the Irunmole Saga by Jean-Marc Iyeli Akerele
Alade Akeju is up the proverbial creek without a paddle or even a light headwind. Not only has he just lost the lucrative business that he spent centuries building through an unexpected and spectacularly ruthless act of betrayal by his protege, but now the exceptionally powerful and extremely irate Orisha who has been chasing him for more than a thousand years has finally caught up to him in the 21st Century, leading to his becoming an unwilling guest of the federal penal system. And if that wasn’t bad enough Yemoja, the Orisha who has bound him, is now forcing him to do some extremely evil things to seed the dark weapon that she placed inside him at the moment of his birth in the distant past so that she can finally wield it and put an end to the endless wars between the gods for once and for all and enable the Orishas to reign supreme. When he is sent by her into a strange world that exists alongside this one, but is hidden from the sight of the gods, in order to feed the weapon and bring it to maturity, Alade betrays Yemoja and instead uses all of his now growing powers and considerable skills to not only outwit the very goddess who has made a pawn of him but to also draw the dark and destructive power that she seeks to himself instead of meekly turning it over to Yemoja as she had hoped, so that once and for all, he can break the metaphysical chains that bind him. And while he is trying to accomplish all this, unknown to him an even greater power than the gods themselves also has plans for him and has placed the fate of the entire cosmos squarely on his oblivious and immortal shoulders. Filled with gods and many other supernatural beings taken exclusively from African mythologies from all over the continent, “Alade” is the first book in a series where not everything is what it seems and even the gods themselves are pawns in a cosmic game beyond their own celestial comprehension.