Novels
Biniyam “Beanie” Teshome, a thirty-nine-year-old Ethiopian-American tech manager in
Silicon Valley, quits his antidepressants cold turkey three weeks before the first book
opens. Over six days his carefully managed life unravels into mania, and the trilogy
follows him into paranoid psychosis in Addis Ababa and, finally, into seven weeks of
psychiatric hospitalization, where the open question is whether what fills the cracks
constitutes repair or only marks where a man shattered.
Yosef, a depressed Ethiopian-American, works night shifts at EnenTech in Addis Ababa,
rating AI-generated health suggestions for wealthy Western clients. By night he watches
one of them through her data, telling himself he is helping her. When a lie destroys a
woman he has wronged, he flees to America, reinvents himself, and marries the woman he
has been surveilling, becoming complicit in horrors he only dimly understands. A tragedy
about a man who could stop at any time and chooses not to.
In the Piassa neighborhood of Addis Ababa, a homeless man named Ayub is pulled into a
supernatural obligation when a dog bites him and marks him as a threshold crosser. The
story weaves Ethiopian mysticism (zar spirits, buda, tenquay) with the gritty texture of
Piassa street life, arriving at a sacrifice both chosen and inevitable.
A first-person diary told by Helen, born Eleni, called Chachut, a woman working in the
shembeko houses of Addis Ababa. Each installment is triggered by a sensory detail in her
present and spirals back through memory, threading a single proof through the series:
that the beauty she never asked to carry is a weapon.
Ato T
In progressHorrorOccult
A surreal occult horror novella set in a decaying Italian-built apartment building in
Addis Ababa. An elderly man’s intolerance toward those he considers beneath him summons
a supernatural reckoning, and he trades away his humanity to preserve his illusion of
control and cleanliness.
Shorter & Other Fiction
Stranded at the Kaliti IT complex after dark, Yosef is rescued by a stranger and delivered
to Aster’s Pension, a building that is restaurant, bar, and brothel stacked in layers. Over
one night he is fed, sheltered, and confronted with its moral economy, waking to a gap in
his memory and the nickname that will follow him: miskeen ferenj. Poor foreigner. Poor boy.
A companion to Ferenju. Yosef is carried south through the autumn rains to a walled
compound and brought before the Hajj, an unseen spiritual authority behind a curtain who
reads him through a boy’s translation. Yosef reaches for his oldest deflection and leaves
unconverted, skeptical, carrying the question out the way he carried it in.
